Minister Wong: Circuit Breaker Might Be Extended If Unlinked Local Cases Continue to Rise

2020-04-06 , 12:22 pm

For those who are hoping that circuit breaker measures can finally come to an end on 4 May 2020, you could be disappointed.

Minister Lawrence Wong Says It Could Be Extended Further

In an exclusive interview with CNA, the minister said that the end date for the stricter measures coming in on 7 Apr is a tentative date.

Depending on what the situation is like on 4 May, they could make a decision to end the measures or extend it even further.

Yeah, that could be bad.

25% of S’pore’s Workforce Will Continue Working

When PM Lee spoke to Singaporeans, he said that other than essential services, every business in Singapore has to let their employees work from home.

And if it’s impossible for them to do so? They’ll have to suspend their business activities during this period.

During the interview, Mr Wong said that based on their data, with only essential services essentially operating during this period, 25% of Singapore’s workforce will continue to work.

As for the rest, they’ll either stop working or work from home.

And as to whether the remaining 75% can come back to work, it depends on two factors.

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The Deciding Factors

One of the deciding factors is, of course, the number of local cases, Mr Wong revealed.

But other than that, the task force is also looking at the number of local unlinked cases as well.

Should the number of local unlinked cases remain in the double digits, he says, the circuit breaking measures will be extended.

Which makes sense because if there are more unlinked cases, it means that there are more community transmission clusters that were not found.

And if it was not stamped out in time, the entire situation could turn Singapore into a second Italy.

After all, while our healthcare system has bandwidth for more Covid-19 patients, they’ve revealed that if the number of Covid-19 cases spikes beyond a certain benchmark, they’ll run out of beds and equipment.

A Simple Analogy

If you can’t visualise the situation, just think of the haze situation in Indonesia.

If there are too many hotspots and Indonesia couldn’t put them out in time, the smog will accumulate and suffocate many different countries.

So How Can Singaporeans Help?

Well, for one, we can choose to adhere to the new measures and try to go out of our homes sparingly.

One sound advice given is to treat everybody as though they potentially have Covid-19.

Especially now when it’s proven that Covid-19 can be spread by people who do not exhibit symptoms (asymptotic transmission) or show mild symptoms.

Don’t know much about circuit breaking measures in Singapore? Here’s a list of articles that might be helpful:

You can do your part as a responsible citizen through helping out in contact tracing by downloading the TraceTogether app.

In the meantime, keep yourself updated by bookmarking MOH’s website here and registering for the Gov.sg’s WhatsApp service here.