SINGAPORE, Oct 4 — There are 9,800 patients recovering from Covid-19 at home and, as of yesterday, more than 2,800 people had been discharged from the national home recovery scheme.
Health Minister Ong Ye Kung gave these numbers in Parliament on Monday as he updated the House on the coronavirus situation here in response to questions from several Members of Parliament (MPs).
On the home recovery programme, Ong said that more than half of those who are infected with Covid-19 would be asked to recover from home and the authorities expect this proportion to rise in the coming weeks.
He added that in recent days, 93 per cent of those who are eligible for home recovery were contacted promptly and smoothly eased into the programme.
“But we still have difficulties contacting the remaining minority because there was either no response or their contact details are not accurate,” he said.
“This is another teething issue that we are ironing out.”
Ong also said that since the Singapore Armed Forces stepped in to help man the hotlines, the authorities have been able to answer 70 per cent of the calls that have streamed in.
Workers’ Party MP He Ting Ru of the Sengkang Group Representation Constituency (GRC) asked whether the government had anticipated and prepared for the surge in cases.
In response, Ong acknowledged that the roll-out of the home recovery scheme to admit the majority of fully vaccinated coronavirus patients “did not go well” and the processes in place for the programme were not totally ready.
“All the complaints about conveyancing… people calling in and not getting responses were not because the beds were totally full, but the processes with regard to the home recovery programme were not totally ready,” he said.
“We were caught by the sudden increase. We were still implementing a pilot programme when all this happened, but the team swung into action… Everybody’s putting (their) heart and soul into solving the problems, so day by day we are seeing improvements.”
On the issue of operational capacity, Dr Janil Puthucheary, Senior Minister of State for Health, said that each day on average, officers from the Ministry of Health (MOH) and the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority handle 6,700 queries on quarantine orders and stay-home notices.
These questions relate to issues, such as one’s quarantine status, how one will be taken to a quarantine facility, Covid-19 testing as well as requests to cancel a quarantine order.
Dr Puthucheary said that these questions usually take three working days to resolve, but the recent surge in coronavirus cases had resulted in more complex questions that take longer to resolve.
These in turn have led to longer waits for others calling the hotline numbers for help.
While the government is working to enhance resources in this area, he said that it was not “always useful to comprehensively contact-trace around every case detected”.
The authorities will therefore now focus the efforts of its 350 full-time contact-tracers on detecting cases in vulnerable settings such as hospitals, nursing homes and schools.
“These are areas where contact-mapping and comprehensive identification of close contacts have the greatest public health benefit today,” he said.
“What we are doing is calling on the self-responsibility of our people to aid in our efforts.”
Publishing data on other diseases
Given that Covid-19 patients who recover at home do not have to take a swab test or receive a discharge memo at the end of their 10 days in isolation, Jessica Tan, MP for East Coast GRC, said that these people would not have their coronavirus-positive statuses cleared on their TraceTogether contact-tracing mobile application.
She asked about the help that could be given to them, so that they may resume their daily activities.
In response, Ong said that the government had also received feedback on the issue and would, in the next few days, remove the alert on the day that the patient is discharged from home recovery.
Separately, Yio Chu Kang MP Yip Hon Weng wondered if MOH would consider publishing the infection and death rates for the seasonal flu and the mosquito-borne dengue disease as benchmarks to compare against those of Covid-19 so as to allay the public’s fears.
Responding, Dr Puthucheary said that the government intended to communicate the relative risks of contracting the coronavirus compared with other diseases such as influenza and dengue.
It, however, plans to do so only after Singapore gets through the present wave of Covid-19 infections.
“At the moment, we haven’t reached (an) equilibrium yet. We are in the middle of quite a large wave and there are very real anxieties around Covid-19, especially for the elderly and vulnerable unvaccinated,” he said.
“The anxieties around the large number of cases in the wave that we are experiencing is very real and shouldn’t be underplayed.”
Singapore has been racing to contain a recent surge in Covid-19 cases fuelled by the highly contagious Delta strain of the coronavirus.
Yesterday, the country recorded 2,057 new infections, taking its total case count to 103,843. Singapore’s Covid-19 death toll stands at 113. — TODAY
