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SDP Reveals Alternate Plan to Tackle COVID-19; Suggestions Include Doing Away with ‘Blanket Closure & Restrictions’

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2021-09-29 , 8:57 am

If you’ve been on social media for the past few days, you’d probably know about Dr Chee Soon Juan’s very angry Facebook post.

Detailing the “knee-jerk reactions” of policymakers, he announced that his political party, the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), will come up with an “eight-point exit strategy” for Singapore.

Fast forward a day later and their proposed plan is out.

Will it go the way of Jamus Lim with his maskless proposal? Or will it be deemed sensible and referenced by the policymakers?

You decide.

SDP Reveals Alternate Plan to Tackle COVID-19; Suggestions Include Doing Away with ‘Blanket Closure & Restrictions’

In SDP’s alternate plan, SDP suggests that eight points that’ll save Singapore and its COVID-19 fatigued population from grief and confusion.

The opposition party suggests that the authorities stop testing asymptomatic vaccinated individuals other than for contact tracing; This way, resources can be focused on the elderly and vulnerable who need it more.
Have a system that’ll ensure everyone (including pregnant women and children) who tests positive turn up at the Public Health Preparedness Clinics (PHPC); the GP will decide if they should be hospitalised or monitored over the week, just as they do with other infectious diseases such as urinary tract infection. GPs will, of course, be compensated for their time and efforts.
Keep infected patients in nursing homes who do not need hospitalisation and keep them away from other residents; this will help to keep the strain on hospitals down. Needless to say, GPs will be the ones to decide if the patients require hospitalisation or not.
Have a dedicated ambulance hotline for COVID-19
Regularly publish reports on test positivity and clusters in addition to the recent plan to publish a map of emerging cases
Remove blanket closure and restrictions; instead, do a localised closure (where affected buildings or facilities are shut down, etc) instead of closing areas that haven’t been affected
Every hospital and referral lab must do molecular epidemiology (genetic fingerprinting) for every positive case and feed it into a database modelled after WHO’s GISAID and made public; this’ll make identifying large clusters more reliable
Conduct rapid adaptive randomised clinical trials on WHO-approved vaccines and so they can be brought into Singapore to be studied as primary or booster shots; similar tests should be conducted on promising agents like ivermectin or povidone-iodine to settle the rumours about alternative treatments once and for all

A Sensible & Foresighted Plan

According to SDP, the policymakers’ recent measures does not depict a coherent, well-thought-out direction to resolve Singapore’s COVID-19 situation.

Instead, it was a “series of knee-jerk reactions” which led to “stop-start, on-again/off-again policies” which has an adverse effect on both employers and employees.

Calling their own plan “sensible” and “foresighted”, SDP revealed that the plan proposed above was drawn up by their healthcare panel led by infectious diseases specialist and chairman Professor Paul Tambyah.

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Feature Image: kandl stock/ shutterstock.com / Screengrab from SDP website

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