19 COVID-19 Cases Today (20 Dec) & They’re All Imported

Despite the scare in Mandarin Orchard Singapore yesterday, it appears that we’re still keeping COVID-19 under control.

As of 12pm today (20 December 2020), the Ministry of Health (MOH) has preliminarily confirmed 19 new cases of COVID-19 infection.

All of them are imported cases.

This brings the total number of cases in Singapore to 58,422.

Based on yesterday’s figures, the number of new cases in the community has remained low, with no new cases in the past week.

MOH Investigating 13 Imported Cases Who Could’ve Infected Each Other in SHN Hotel

Yesterday, it was announced that the Ministry of Health (MOH) is investigating 13 cases of COVID-19 infection amongst individuals who had served Stay-Home Notice (SHN) at Mandarin Orchard Singapore (333 Orchard Road).

As a precautionary measure, Mandarin Orchard Singapore will stop accepting new guests with immediate effect.

Those currently serving SHN at the hotel will be moved to another SHN dedicated facility. The hotel has made arrangements to check out existing guests progressively. Restaurant and event spaces within the hotel will also be closed.

Apparently, the National Public Health Laboratory conducts whole genome sequencing and phylogenetic analysis on all COVID-19 cases as part of routine laboratory surveillance. It takes about four weeks to culture the virus and complete the genome sequencing.

The 13 imported cases, who were confirmed between 2 November and 11 November to have COVID-19 infection, were observed to have high genetic similarity despite the cases having arrived from different countries, including Bahrain, Canada, Indonesia, Myanmar, Netherlands, Philippines, South Korea, UAE, UK and US.

Technically speaking, they should be slightly different since they’re all from different countries as the virus will mutate a little (very common for a virus to mutate).

This suggests that these cases were likely infected from a similar source…which means it could’ve been a cluster within the hotel.

Further investigations by MOH found that these 13 cases had served SHN at Mandarin Orchard Singapore between 22 October and 11 November 2020. Genome sequencing and analysis are continuing for cases beyond 11 November.

Epidemiological investigations were immediately initiated to determine if there is a potential link between these 13 cases, and to study if transmission could have occurred locally, and not from their country of origin.

Experts have weighed in on the issue which you can read about here.

Featured Image: Rajaraman Arumugam / Shutterstock.com (Image is for illustration purpose only)