SINGAPORE, May 15 — Health Minister Gan Kim Yong cautioned the public against thinking that the authorities will do away with safe distancing measures to curb the spread of Covid-19 even if everyone in Singapore is vaccinated.
That is because Singapore cannot rely on herd immunity. Chiefly, it is because there are some segments of the population that are unable to be vaccinated due to medical conditions, vaccination itself does not totally stop transmission and there are new viral variants emerging.
“So we also mustn’t run away with the idea that once we are able to vaccinate everyone in Singapore, we are safe and therefore we can do away with all kinds of precautions. I think vaccination has to be seen as part of a plethora of tools that we are putting in place to protect Singapore,” he said.
“Safe distancing measures... remain very important, are a very critical part of our defence against infection. In addition to that, contact tracing, ring-fencing, testing and so on, are part and parcel of this whole suite of tools that we are going to deploy to protect Singapore and Singaporeans against Covid-19.”
Gan made these remarks yesterday (May 14) during a press conference held by the multi-ministry task force tackling the Covid-19 pandemic.
It announced on Friday stricter safe-distancing measures as community cases here continued to climb and as the cluster at Changi Airport burgeoned to become the largest with 59 cases on Friday.
It overtook the cluster of 44 cases at Tan Tock Seng Hospital where a nurse was first discovered to have Covid-19 on April 27. The first person confirmed to be infected from the airport cluster was a cleaner working there who was diagnosed on May 6.
From May 16, dining in at eateries, hawker centres and food courts will not be allowed for about a month until June 13. and the maximum size of social gatherings will be cut to two from five.
When asked about the government’s longer-term strategy for Singapore to exit the pandemic, Gan said that eradicating the coronavirus would be “almost impossible” and that Singaporeans will have to learn to live with it.
Vaccination does not totally prevent transmission, but most people would still be protected against very severe outcomes if the vast majority are vaccinated.
It also helps to reduce the extent of transmission, which will reduce the number of cases and allow the Government to better control the infection outbreaks.
“In combination of all these factors as well as measures, that will allow us to restore our community and our economy to normalcy as much as possible with vaccination and with a certain amount of safe distancing measures that we can put in place,” he said.
Dr Paul Tambyah, president of Asia Pacific Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infection, said that Singapore ultimately should aim to have zero deaths, zero severe infections and zero large outbreaks — rather than to have “zero Covid-19”.
An elimination strategy to completely eradicate the coronavirus as taken by countries such as Australia and New Zealand would not be possible for a place such as Singapore that relies on manpower and goods from other countries to sustain its economy, he added.
If Singapore is able to achieve high vaccination rates and closely monitor the severity of illnesses including genetic monitoring so that health professionals could be alerted to potentially harmful mutants, residents here would then be able to “live with the virus”.
In such a situation, Dr Tambyah said that the safe distancing measures would need to be changed only “very infrequently as we will have learned to accept occasional mild infections”.
Dr Leong Hoe Nam, an infectious disease specialist at Mount Elizabeth Novena Hospital, is hoping that 90 per cent of the population here will be vaccinated, with a booster shot towards the end of the year.
“Then, it is less likely Singapore will be subjected to repeated changes,” he said. ― TODAY
