257 COVID-19 Cases Today (19 July); 8 Community Cases With 2 S’poreans / S’pore PRs

It’s exactly one week after the General Elections, and all eyes are back to the COVID-19 outbreak since Jamus Lim is no longer warming the cockles of our hearts.

And if you’ve paid attention to the COVID-19 daily new cases in Singapore, it’s remained stable before, during and after the GE.

Today, MOH has preliminarily confirmed 257 new cases.

This brings the total number of cases in our little red dot to 47,912.

8 of them are community cases, with 2 of them Singaporeans or Singapore PRs.

In addition, 5 of them are imported cases, in which all of whom had been placed on stay-home notices upon their arrival in Singapore.

The majority of the cases are residents staying in dormitories.

On average, based on yesterday’s numbers, the number of new cases in the community has decreased, from an average of 18 cases per day in the week before, to an average of 9 per day in the past week.

The number of unlinked cases in the community has also decreased, from an average of 9 cases per day in the week before, to an average of 5 per day in the past week.

So, would we see 50k cases by National Day?

Well, maybe, though by the middle of August, the number of new cases might finally drop to single or double-digit.

Dormitory Clusters Will be “Cleared” by Mid-August

During a virtual press conference by the multi-ministry task force on Friday, it’s revealed that as of Thursday, 232,000 migrant workers have either recovered or been tested to be free of the virus.

What’s left is the last group of workers, and like a marathon, the last stretch is usually the most painful, as many of the workers in this group come from dorms with higher prevalence of coronavirus cases.

National Development Minister Lawrence Wong said, “But the main point is that we are completing the clearance of all the workers in the dorms quite soon. We believe that by mid-August we can complete this work, possibly even earlier than that.

“This is an important milestone – the fact that after the clusters in the dorms flared up, we’ve had to manage, contain and control the flare up, but now we are reaching the final stretch and are able very soon to complete the clearance of all the workers, all the dorms, and eventually have these workers back at work.”

But even after all of them have been cleared from the virus, they’d still be tested once every two weeks as part of a routine test.

In the meantime, you can help stop the transmission of the virus by downloading the TraceTogether app. If you’re still worried about privacy, you might want to watch this video: