Someone once told me this joke: “If you want to meet your friends, just get them to take the train from Joo Koon to Changi Airport together.”
It’s a bad joke because people can only leave the house for essential tasks, and gossiping about the girl in your school isn’t essential.
The face of the fight against COVID-19 in Singapore, National Development Minister Lawrence Wong, finally answered the question in today’s virtual press conference: Why are we allowed to crowd in a train with strangers and not allowed to crowd in a void deck with our friends?
Minister Explains Why We Can Take Public Transport But Cannot Meet Our Friends
The short answer is this: the risk in public transport is lower than the risk of gathering with friends.
For a start, taking the public transport is a short process—usually less than an hour.
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But chances are, you won’t meet your friends just for an hour.
Secondly, there are precautions made in public transport: people need to wear masks, the trains are cleaned regularly and people aren’t supposed to talk.
That means taking the public transport is a “transient risk”—a very short risk.
But meeting friends isn’t.
He said that “social interactions are of a different magnitude of risk all together.”
In other words, it’s different, and that’s backed up by data.
He added, “When we gather together, whether to talk, to interact, to have a meal together, the risks are much higher, and the evidence we have for cases in Singapore and also the evidence around the world, shows that the vast majority of cases are typically spread by these few events that involve social interactions and gatherings.”
So gathering in a train and gathering for social interaction are two different things altogether.
In Phase One, social gathering of any size is still banned—even for dating couple. This will be lifted in Phase Two, but there’s a limit of five people in any social gathering.
If you’ve been dying to meet your friend, just wait for three more weeks. Phase One is expected to lift before the end of June.
Here’s a simplified summary of the South Korea martial law that even a 5-year-old would understand:
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