News

7 COVID-19 Cases in ICU Now With 10 New Clusters

2021-07-31 , 10:02 am

Another day, another 100-plus cases.

It’d be nice if the coronavirus could take a break for a while, but it’ll clearly be some time before that happens.

Yesterday (30 July), 131 new locally transmitted cases were reported, including 52 unlinked infections.

Here are the details:

10 New Clusters

Remember the days where we moaned about having 10 community cases a day? It was a simpler time, where Phase 2 (Heightened Annoyance) didn’t exist.

Nowadays, we’re identifying 10 new clusters daily, as we’ve seen in the last few days.

Of the 10 reported yesterday, one was linked to Zuellig Pharma, a healthcare services provider. It has a total of six cases.

The other nine clusters were all linked to individual cases, with infections ranging from three to six.

In total, we now have 63 active clusters in the country.

Eight cases were added to an existing cluster at Samy’s Curry Restaurant, bringing its total tally to 49.

The Marina Bay Sands cluster also has 54 cases now, after two more infections were added to it yesterday.

Jurong Fishery Port Cluster Almost Surpasses 1,000 Mark

The Jurong Fishery Port nearly surpassed the 1,000 mark for infections yesterday, after 28 new cases were linked to it.

The cluster now has 999 cases. It remains our biggest active cluster.

Just one new infection was added to the KTV cluster, taking its total to 250.

7 Cases in ICU

At the moment, there are 571 COVID-19 cases in hospital, most of whom are well and under observation.

26 severe cases require oxygen supplementation, while seven are in critical condition in the intensive care unit.

Only two among these 26 severe cases are fully vaccinated – one requires oxygen supplementation, while the other needs intensive care as she has underlying medical conditions.

Number of Severe Cases Could Increase

Experts here believe that the number of severe cases here could increase, as the virus continues to spread in the community.

The number of severe COVID-19 cases – those requiring intensive care or oxygen supplementation – has already tripled over the last two weeks.

There are two main reasons for this.

The first is that there are many unvaccinated seniors among the new cases. Since we have a large number of unvaccinated seniors, if community cases increase, unvaccinated seniors are bound to make up a certain portion of the cases.

And since they’re older and unvaccinated, they’re more likely to fall severely ill from COVID-19.

Vaccination Progress

One way to tackle this, of course, is to get more seniors inoculated.

Currently, less than 75% of seniors aged 70 and above have been fully vaccinated. However, nearly 80% of them have received at least one dose, indicating that more and more seniors are heeding the government’s advice.

As of Thursday (29 July), a total of around 7.43 million doses of MRNA vaccines have been administered here, covering about 4.29 million people.

3.26 million have completed their full vaccination regimen.

MOH reiterated that the evidence continues to show that vaccination helps prevent falling severely ill from COVID-19.

If you’re still unsure about the vaccine, watch this video: