3 Locations In NTU Reported By MOH Was Visited By a Former NTU Staff Who Didn’t Know Where He Got Infected

Singaporeans love their food, but we seem to have a competitor: the coronavirus.

Food courts all over the country have been graced by Covid-19’s presence in the last few months.

And more recently, the virus seems to have taken a liking to the food served at a particular university.

3 Locations In NTU Reported By MOH Was Visited By a Former NTU Staff Who Didn’t Know Where He Got Infected

On Tuesday (8 Sept), the Ministry of Health (MOH) added several food courts to their already long list of public places visited by infectious Covid-19 cases for over 30 minutes.

These included three eateries at Nanyang Technological University (NTU):

• Quad Cafe at NTU’s School of Biological Sciences
• Korean eatery Paik’s Bibim in NTU’s North Spine Plaza
• North Spine Food Court

Well, it’s now been revealed that all three food courts were visited by the same person.

Looks like someone was hungry.

According to NTU, the case was a former employee who last worked at the university on 28 Aug and has not been on campus since.

He was not on the teaching staff, though, and did not exhibit any symptoms on campus or after testing positive, according to ST.

NTU said the former employee tested positive after a swab test when he landed at a foreign airport on 1 Sept and informed the university of his infection on 4 Sept.

He is unsure where or when he contracted the virus.

“We thank the former employee for informing us of his test results, and we wish him a speedy recovery,” said the university.

NUH has since issued quarantine orders to all close contacts of the former staff, and carried out deep-cleaning at the former employee’s work areas. It has also stepped up cleaning of the affected common locations.

75 New Cases Reported on Wednesday (9 Sept)

If there’s one thing we’ve learned during the coronavirus pandemic is that when we receive some good news, we should expect an avalanche of bad news soon after.

On Monday, a mere 22 new infections were reported, our lowest daily tally since 22 March. Singaporeans leapt for joy, and it seemed like the infection would finally have to say its goodbyes here.

But then, two days later, on Wednesday (9 Sept), 75 new cases were reported.

Then again, it’s still better than the days we used to get over 1,000 new cases daily.

Fortunately, only one out of the 75 was a case in the community; a 33-year-old Bangladeshi work permit holder.

The man was linked to a cluster at the Kenyon/UBS construction site in the Dhoby Ghaut area.

14 imported cases were also announced, two of whom are Singaporeans. All of them were placed on 14-day stay-home notices upon arrival in Singapore.

Migrant workers living in dormitories made up the remaining 60 new coronavirus patients, 29 of whom were identified as contacts of previous cases.

Some Good News

Despite the higher number of cases, MOH had some good news for us:

The number of community cases has decreased from a daily average of three cases two weeks ago to two in the past week.

Similarly, the average number of daily unlinked community cases has also decreased from two cases to one over the same period.

I hope to report the same sort of numbers for the total daily tally soon.