COVID-19 White Paper: U-turn on wearing masks and confusing safety measures are among the areas Singapore says it could have done better during the pandemic
SINGAPORE: Singapore’s mask-wearing policy early in the pandemic and safe management measures that confused the public were areas in which the Singapore Government could have responded better to COVID-19.
Speaking to reporters, Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said COVID-19 has been “a very complex and wicked problem on a grand scale”, requiring the Government to operate in the “fog of war”. “On hindsight, as the clinical evidence on COVID-19 was still evolving and before we learnt how easily the virus spread, we could have been less definitive in our position on mask-wearing.”
The depleting stockpile of masks, as well as prevailing guidance by the World Health Organization , informed the Government’s initial stance, the review found.CONFUSING SAFE MANAGEMENT MEASURES While the intention was to"carve out exceptions" for important life events, the rules “tended to emphasise precision over simplicity” and were often too complicated, stated the White Paper.
Traditional Chinese Medicine workers were also excluded from mask distribution to healthcare workers as they were not considered to be part of the healthcare sector.OUTBREAK IN DORMITORIES “Given the communal living environment, the dormitory outbreak had every possibility of becoming a major disaster. We should have probed deeper and conducted better and earlier ground surveillance, such as by doing dipstick testing on sample populations to make the most of limited testing resources.”
The Government was also hampered by the limited testing capability at the time and the lack of integrated access to migrant workers’ health records. The Government acted with an “abundance of caution”, but extended restrictions took a toll on workers’ mental well-being, it noted. The review singled out two occasions. The first was when Singapore restricted entry progressively on a country-by-country basis as the global situation worsened through February and March 2020.
“Singapore incurred reputational cost and lost some goodwill from this segment of the community who also had their homes here,” stated the review."Once the virus starts spreading locally, border measures are no longer effective or relevant, although they may still provide psychological reassurance and be a useful signal of caution," the review stated.
But the TraceTogether app took several months after its launch in March 2020 to actually make an impact on contact tracing efforts, because its effectiveness depended on widespread adoption of the app. “This error naturally caused unhappiness and affected public trust,” stated the White Paper. “The Government should have been clearer about the use of TraceTogether data from the onset.”TRANSITION TO ENDEMIC COVID-19
It noted that some people felt the Government was “constantly shifting goal posts for reopening” by citing different measures, such as vaccination rate targets, weekly infection growth rates, intensive care utilisation rates and hospital bed occupancy rates. This caused uncertainty and anxiety among patients and their families, and a surge of people called government hotlines, overwhelming them.The White Paper identified seven lessons for future pandemics and other national crises.
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