3 days ago the Singapore government announced plans of re-opening the economy and the gradual lifting of circuit breaker (lockdown) measures. Re-opening will be done in 3 phases starting from 2 June.
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In phase 1, most of the measures will still be in place. Schools are just partially open. House visits are still very restricted. Also, there will still be no dine-in at food outlets. As such, many Singaporeans actually consider this an extension of the circuit breaker measures 😅. Personally, as long as the measures are being eased, I will consider it a step forward.
Case Counts
The Singapore government had practically isolated the dorm residents and hence it is meaningful to divide statistics into 2 groups. Looking at the daily statistics, we can see that the case numbers from dorm residents are still relatively high while community cases are trending down. Although the total reported cases had already exceeded 30,000, I personally feel quite reassured when I look at the community case counts.
There are over 300,000 dorm residents in Singapore. When news broke that cases are spreading fast among the dorm residents, I theorized that if we use the statistics from Diamond Princess as a gauge, there will eventually be 60,000 infected (20%) from the dorms.
However, judging on how things are progressing, the final numbers will likely be significantly lesser. Why? These dorm residents are generally between 25-35 of age and according to statistics below, the median days of hospital stay for this group is 14 days. As far as I know, Singapore is capable of conducting 8,000 tests daily with plans to ramp it up to 40,000 tests. Hence, a good portion of the dorm residents are still not tested till date. Assuming the outbreak within the dorms started in early April and the spread reached the peak in mid April, we are already more than 1 month into it. So there is a good chance that many of the untested dorm residents have already recovered even if they have the virus.
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As a result, I personally think that daily reported cases from dorm residents will drastically decline over the next couple of weeks. And I am hopeful to see the daily reported cases to be single digit by the middle of June. I think the government also have the same projection and that is why they anticipated that phase 1 of re-opening will last for 4 weeks, till end of June. I also project that the total case counts in Singapore to be in the range of 32,000 to 35,000 by mid-June.
When will phase 3 come?
Phase 3 is what the Singapore government coined as the "new normal". It will last until either a vaccine or an effective treatment is found. There is no specific date from the government so I think it will very much be dependent on the case statistics. If I am the government, I will only dare to enter phase 3 when the following 2 conditions are met,
- Active cases dropped to a level where hospital bed occupancy rate return to pre-COVID-19 period
- Daily reported case counts dropped to 0 for at least a week (2 weeks to be safe)
As I have previously mentioned, the main concern of COVID-19 isn't the death rate but the serious complication rate and whether the healthcare system is able to handle the additional load. I think the government will consider the healthcare load as an important metric to decide when we can enter phase 3. Next, daily reported case counts should be 0 for a while before we can enter a "new normal". This also includes the cases from dorm residents.
When will this happen? It is really hard to say and that is why the government is not putting a date at this point. However, what I dare predict is that the Singapore General Elections will likely be announced together with, or shortly after, phase 3 😉.
Our government is smart, a phase 3 announcement is a huge boost to the morale of Singaporeans and with the deadline to call for the next elections looming in, I believe the start of phase 3 will be a good time to call for the elections and naturally our incumbent government will get re-elected with a strong mandate.
A summary of my predictions made in this post,
- Daily dorm residents reported case counts to decline steadily from this point onward
- Single digit dorm residents daily reported case counts by middle of June
- Total dorm residents case counts to be in the range of 32,000 - 35,000 by mid-June. I don't think it will exceed 35,000
- Elections to be called very soon after Phase 3 is declared
Let's see how many of them will be proven right 😅.
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