Minster of Health Ong Ye Kung spoke at the Nurses’ Merit Award evenent held at Suntec on 6 July, as he spoke on the current wave of Covid infections.
He said that Singapore has not introduced heightened measures despite the increase in cases, and that “the only thing we have implemented is for you to wear your masks indoors.”
Ong Ye Kung’s statement
When the Delta wave subsided in end 2021, it was a relief, but the respite was short-lived. Soon, we heard of a highly-mutated, more transmissible new variant from Africa – called Omicron. We delayed its arrival through border restrictions and domestic social restrictions, but by February 2022, we were confronted with a massive Omicron infection wave.
Fortunately, the symptoms of Omicron infections were less severe compared to Delta. The burden of care then shifted from the ICU to the Emergency Department (ED) and normal wards. Once again, nurses took on the high surge in patient load. While we could discharge many patients every day, more patients would arrive the next day. Every week, we hoped the situation would ease, but it went on and on, from one week to the next, and lasted for about 12 weeks.
To ensure hospitals could still cope, we intensified the medical care provided at previous CCFs and converted them to COVID-19 Treatment Facilities (CTFs) and expanded their capacity. In fact, nurses from all over Singapore – from both public and private institutions, from acute and community hospitals, from specialty centres, and even from the Health Promotion Board – all came together to run the much-needed CTFs.
We are now in the middle of another wave. As I have always said, going through a wave is like riding a bicycle downslope. If you do not do anything – you will accelerate faster and faster, until you crash. So, we always have three things with us to control this bike going downslope – left brake, right brake and cushion at the end. The left brake is Safe Management Measures (SMMs) to reduce transmission and infections. The right brake is vaccinations, so that it also reduces transmission and more importantly, if you are infected, you are less likely to fall severely ill. But that will still make the bike go down at quite a high speed. When you go down and hit the road, you have the cushion, which is our healthcare capacity. You are the last line of defence when all else fails. When patients appear before you, you take care of them.
What is happening in this current wave is that the left brake – SMMs – there are almost none. The only thing that we have implemented is wearing masks indoors. This is such an important juncture in our journey towards endemicity, because it is the first time since the pandemic that we are going through a wave without a circuit breaker, without heightened alert, not even with group sizes of five, and no capacity limits – none of that. We are trying our best to avoid doing that, because that is an important mark of living with COVID-19.
Our right brake – vaccinations. We are still vaccinating, but our coverage is already very high. So on the left, we try not to do; on the right, there is only so much we can do. What is left is the cushion at the end, which is our healthcare capacity. In other words, in this Omicron wave, by and large, the burden falls on you, on our hospitals, on our nurses, on our medical personnel.
As the rest of Singapore goes through a wave like this, and people go about our lives normally, I hope you all remember who is carrying the burden. Who is carrying the burden to make sure that the rest of Singapore, businesses, students, people who enjoy themselves – recreation, sports – everything goes on, because our hospitals are working and our nurses and doctors are working flat-out.
I believe there are good reasons, looking at the numbers, that the trajectory of the wave has almost peaked or is at its peak. I really hope from here, things will get better.