SINGAPORE, Feb 15 — Singaporeans can look forward to further easing of Covid-19 restrictions once the Omicron transmission wave has peaked and started to subside, Health Minister Ong Ye Kung said yesterday.

He said this in a written answer to a parliamentary question from Mountbatten Member of Parliament (MP) Lim Biow Chuan, who asked what the target criteria are before the Government will consider lifting Covid-19 restrictions and people are allowed to dine and socialise normally again.

In response to another question by Workers’ Party MP Louis Chua, Ong said that some 887,000 health risk warnings have been issued to close contacts and household members of Covid-positive patients between October 11 last year and January 31.

Covid-19 infection numbers have been above the 10,000 mark on most of the past 11 days, with the figure peaking at 13,208 on February 4.

With about 1,200 Covid-19 patients hospitalised presently, ”hospital beds are probably the biggest constraint now”, Ong said.

However, about 30 per cent of these patients are "incidental cases” admitted for non-Covid-19 conditions and later found to have Covid-19 during their stay, because all patients are tested.

"This group typically has no or very mild symptoms,” Ong added. "In other words, they do not take up extra beds due to their infection. So the extra workload on our hospitals is two-thirds of the 1,200 hospitalised cases.”

Patients infected with the dominant Omicron coronavirus strain are also discharged faster, he disclosed. Most of these patients have a short hospital stay of about three to four days, compared with five to eight days for patients infected with the Delta variant.

Ong said that there is "a lot of scope” for the authorities to house patients of the less severe but more contagious Omicron variant at Covid-19 treatment facilities.

Only a quarter of the roughly 3,800 beds at these facilities are occupied and the authorities have plans to increase the number to 4,600 beds by the end of this month.

He added that other indicators suggested that the Covid-19 situation here is under control despite the high daily infection numbers because the majority of cases have mild or no symptoms.

For one thing, deaths from Covid-19 have dropped since the Delta wave of infections.

The mortality rate due to the Omicron variant is comparable to the number of deaths related to various viral infections before the emergence of Covid-19, such as pneumonia, which claimed an average of more than 10 lives a day, Ong said.

Another indicator is that the intensive care units in Singapore are also not coming under pressure, Ong added. At the moment, about 30 patients are under intensive care, compared to about 170 at the peak of the Delta wave.

"We will continue to monitor the key indicators closely to make sure our healthcare system can cope as we ride through the Omicron transmission wave,” Ong said.

"Once it has peaked and start to subside, we can look forward to easing our safe management measures.”

Beyond beds and equipment though, the authorities must also monitor the state of human resources in healthcare.

"While our healthcare workers are very busy and stretched, it is a different level of intensity as during the Delta wave,” the minister said.

Unlike some countries where health workers are resigning in droves, the attrition rate of doctors at public acute hospitals and nurses here has remained comparable to 2019, he said. 

Absenteeism rate due to Covid-19 has also been manageable at about 2 per cent at present, he added.

"We do not take this for granted and will continue to support our healthcare professionals.”

Among the 887,000 who received health risk warnings between Oct 11 last year and Jan 31, 10 per cent of them eventually tested positive for Covid-19, Ong said.

Recipients of health risk warnings issued by the Ministry of Health must test themselves for seven days with an antigen rapid test kit every day before they leave home.

Ong said that during that period, close to 60 per cent of health risk warning recipients were household contacts, while the rest were identified by the TraceTogether system, SafeEntry or other forms of contact tracing. — TODAY