Encouragingly for the rest of the world, the city-state seemed to have suppressed cases without imposing the restrictive lockdown measures endured by millions elsewhere.The answer appears to lie in overlooked clusters of cases among migrant workers living in cramped dormitories and an underestimation of the speed at which those infections could spread through a city where lockdown measures had not been put in place.It was able to contain the initial wave of cases from China by instituting quarantines and contact tracing to ensure that anyone arriving by air, who might have been exposed, was isolated and monitored.Isolation wards installed in hospitals in the wake of the 2003 SARS epidemic also meant that patients were treated in the safest way possible, preventing medical staff from becoming infected.Everything goes forward with modifications as needed, and you keep doing this until there’s a vaccine or a treatment.”
That approach stood in stark contrast to Hong Kong: another Asian self-governed city with a similar size population. As many parts of Asia have already experienced, just because a local outbreak appears to be under control, does not mean a new wave of cases can’t be sparked by an infected person entering from overseas.Until a city or country can be sure that no more infections will come in from outside — or can be effectively tracked and controlled — the lack of local cases does not mean the danger has passed.
Read more at: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/18/asia/singapore-coronavirus-response-intl-hnk/index.html
