347 New Covid-19 Cases Reported Today (14 Jul); 7 Cases In The Community

If you’ve been keeping up with the daily updates by the Ministry of Health (MOH), you’ll notice a pattern.

If it comes in at 3.15pm, chances are, there’s a comparatively fewer number of new cases.

But if it comes in at close to 5pm? That’s when you know the numbers are pretty high.

And today’s no exception.

MOH preliminarily reports 347 new Covid-19 cases today.

7 are cases in the community; 1 Singaporean and 6 work pass holders.

There are 2 imported cases who have been placed on Stay-Home-Notice (SHN) since their arrival in Singapore.

Foreign workers residing in dormitories make up a vast majority of the cases.

With today’s new cases, this brings the total number of cases in Singapore to 46,630.

But don’t go around screaming just yet because there’s a legitimate explanation for this sudden spike.

According to MOH’s explanation yesterday, it’s because there were fewer tests on the samples being done in the lab on 10 and 11 Jul (three guesses why), and they’re now running more tests to clear the backlog of samples.

MOH added that over the next few days, they will have “a larger population of migrant workers in various purpose-built dormitories completing their isolation period”.

More Covid-19 tests are going to be carried out, and as the dormitories they’re coming from “have a higher prevalence of Covid-19” (read: higher chance of getting Covid-19), they expect to see a higher number of confirmed cases in the next few days.

They are on-track to clearing about 80% of the migrant workers in Singapore by end-July, and all of them in mid-August 2020. Thus far, more than 215,000 workers have been tested and cleared.

Jurong West Sec Student Wasn’t COVID-19 Positive & Was Incorrectly Diagnosed; Error Has Led to Whole Cohort on HBL

Somewhere in Jurong West Secondary School, several students could be looking at their phone and going, “Wait, what?! Simi sai?”

Okay, kids nowadays might not use the phrase “simi sai” but the idea is there.

Last week, we got to know that there might be a possible transmission in Jurong West Secondary School.

A 13-year-old boy was tested positive for COVID-19 on 6 July 2020, and about a week later, one of his close contacts, a 13-year-old girl, was reportedly tested positive, too.

That led to the school disinfecting the premises again, and the HBL period for Secondary 1 students, who had been on HBL since 8 July, will be extended for a week (13 July to 18 July) before the start of the one-week mid-term break.

But turns out, it was a misdiagnosis.

The second student, the 13-year-old girl who was “tested positive” on 10 July, was incorrectly diagnosed after Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) mislabelled testing samples.

They said, “Our investigations revealed that there was an erroneous reporting of this case by our laboratory. This arose from a human error in the laboratory where two patients had their specimens cross-labelled.”

According to a MOH press release, “ the laboratory had mislabelled a swab sample from a COVID-19 positive individual as belonging to Case 45655 without properly verifying the patient identifiers of the specimen tubes. Consequently, Case 45655 was recorded as being positive for COVID-19, and was reported to MOH as such.”

45655 is the 13-year-old girl.

So was the sample from the other 13-year-old boy?

No. It “belongs to a migrant worker who had been isolated since his swab, and had not been in contact with any other individuals.”

You can find out more here.

Now that you’re done knowing about Singapore’s current Covid-19 situation, you might as well just watch our latest video whereby we simplify what TraceTogether is here: