MOH & MOM Respond to Allegations That a Migrant Worker With COVID-19 Lived With Other People for Weeks

Here’s what the normal person on the street understands about Covid-19:

• Robin tests for Covid-19
• Test results come back positive
• Robin gets removed from where he was staying and conveyed to care facilities as soon as possible to curb the virus transmission

Unfortunately, one particular Robin didn’t get the same treatment, which led to Facebook posts, creating a big hoo-ha and made two ministries give a public apology.

What Happened:

On 16 July 2020, Facebook users Tsjin Dolly Chandra and Kelly Soh took to the social media platform to share their experience.

According to Ms Soh, her migrant worker was swabbed for Covid-19 on 22 June 2020.

However, he was only informed that he tested positive for the coronavirus 3 weeks later on 13 July 2020.

Ms Soh had immediately informed the dormitory operator (where her worker was staying at) about the situation but was told they had to wait for the Ministry of Health (MOH).

Getting Pushed Around

After several unsuccessful tries, she was finally informed by MOH that the case has been referred to the task force.

She was also told that she had to contact the task force directly since the case has been handed over to them.

When she called the task force, she claimed that a person named “Benedict” told her that the task force can’t move unless told to by healthcare clinics or the health agency.

She ended the post off by saying that she didn’t bring this to Facebook to shame anyone but to bring attention to the matter.

And Attention, It Brought

Both MOH and the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) has apologised publicly for the incident.

They explained that the incident happened as a result of an “administrative error”.

Before a dormitory is cleared, the ministries explained, a sample group of swab tests across the dormitory will be taken.

This will allow the authorities to know how much Covid-19 has spread in that dormitory and decide their strategy it.

Usually, they say, the samples will be grouped together to be tested.

If there is a positive result, they will assume that the entire room of 12 workers are infected since they’ve been staying together for the past three months.

The survey testing, they added, does not equate to being cleared from Covid-19.

The Error

Instead of a pool of 12 swabs, for the particular worker, there is only his sample, which resulted in him being tested as an “individual” instead of a “survey group”.

That was why he was informed only after three weeks about his infection.

Throughout this period, 12 workers in the room were cared for in their rooms and their health were monitored by medical staff.

As for the 11 roommates of the infected person, seven were previously infected with Covid-19 and has already recovered, three were recently infected and were taken to care facilities while one was not infected.

This Doesn’t Affect Clearing Strategy

The ministries also emphasised that this incident does not compromise “the appropriateness of the clearance strategy for the dormitory, nor the treatment and care of all the workers at Toh Guan Dormitory”

The workers in the incident were also well throughout the timeframe and are asymptomatic cases (did not display symptoms).

Beginning from end-June, all workers in the dormitories, including the twelve workers, have been systematically tested for Covid-19.

Toh Guan Dormitory is on track to getting cleared at the end of July.

Singapore’s Dormitory Clearing Strategy:

According to MOH, Singapore is using “a combination of mass serological and mass PCR tests”.

For dormitories with a higher rate of infection, authorities will administer serological tests first.

Serological tests can test for the presence of antibodies within a person’s blood or serum.

If it comes back positive, it means that a person was infected in the past (10 to 14 days) and will no longer be infectious after a period of isolation.

If it comes back negative, there are two possibilities:

• The person has not been infected with Covid-19 before; or
• The person is recently infected with Covid-19

PCR tests will then be administered on workers with negative serological test results (and workers in other dormitories with not so high infection rates).

For those who test negative for the PCR test, they will be kept in isolation for 14 days and be re-swabbed again before being cleared.

This way, they can ensure that they don’t let out any person who is infected with Covid-19 and is still in the infectious phase.

The Accuracy Of Sample Surveys

Then now, you’re wondering, why sample surveys?

Sample surveys have the nasty habit of being able to roughly represent what the actual situation is like, as long as the factors are carefully and accurately defined.

Just look at the sample count during the recent GE2020 and you’ll see what we mean.

A random selection eliminates human bias which could affect the outcome of the results.

If a group of people is chosen to be tested at random, regardless of factors like:

• whether they’re in a room where there are Covid-19 cases
• whether a particular room has someone new moved in
• if the people in the room go to the dormitory supermarket more

Results of the sample group survey will closely mirror the situation on the ground.

And since the authorities are simply using the broad situation to inform their clearance strategy (PCR or serological tests first), the small variance in results (between sample and reality) will likely not affect the results of the clearance.

Clearing of Dorm Clusters Should be Completed by Mid-August

You most probably won’t be reading stories like this soon.

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.

Now that you know more about the dormitory clearing strategy, you might as well just watch our video on how WiFi routers work and how you can make them fast even at home: