All Migrant Workers Should be ‘Cleared’ by Mid-Aug So We Hopefully Won’t See Hundreds of Cases Daily

Since early April, the number of COVID-19 cases reportedly daily hasn’t looked goody; if you’re someone outside of Singapore, you might think that we’ve not kept the cases under control despite the 2-month lockdown.

But anyone living here would know that majority of the cases are migrant workers living in dormitories, which contributed to almost 94% of the total cases reported here in Singapore.

If we’ve enough resources to test and isolate all 323,000 migrant workers living in dormitories, we’d have a “长痛不如短痛” (long pain no if short pain?) curve, whereby there’d be a drastic spike in a few days that’ll cause heart attacks to people in WHO, and then a steady flow of community cases daily.

But it took months for the authorities to test them all, and by mid-August, the endgame might finally be here.

All Migrant Workers Should be ‘Cleared’ by Mid-Aug

In the latest virtual press conference by the multi-ministry task force, 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.

Mr 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.

Some Recovered Workers Haven’t Gone Back to Work

Unless you have migrant workers in your workforce, you might not feel this effect.

While recovered workers or workers who’ve been tested negative for the virus can resume work, some of them still have to TikTok in their dorms for the entire day because some residents in their dormitories/blocks are still serving their isolation.

The authorities are working on putting “additional decontamination measures to allow these recovered workers to leave the dormitories to resume work safely, without compromising public health,” which will be implemented progressively over the next week.

So if your house renovation is still delayed even when you’re told that the workers have recovered from COVID-19, just be more understanding lah.

But anyways, is it just me, or did anyone else realise that this means almost 20% (or even more since it doesn’t include the last group) of migrant workers living in dormitories are infected?

That virus is indeed sibei infectious seh.

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: