SINGAPORE, April 14 — Singapore has been in the middle of another Covid-19 infection wave for the past month, said the republic’s Minister for Health Ong Ye Kung.
However, he said, like all endemic diseases, the country no longer has very granular data on Covid-19 infections.
Ong was speaking at The National Healthcare Group’s Population Health Collective Annual Work Plan Seminar, earlier today.
Through sampling techniques, he said MOH did however notice that the percentage of patients with acute respiratory symptoms and who tested Covid-19 positive, as well as the viral load in wastewater samples, have gone up.
“This indicates that we are in the middle of a wave for the past month. From there, we estimate the daily infections have probably gone up from 1,400 a month ago to about 4,000 daily cases last week.
“This is a small fraction of the 20,000 or more daily cases we used to experience at the peak of the crisis. Our assessment is that the case numbers have likely stabilised this week,” Ong said.
He noted the virus is endemic, ‘which means it is always circulating within our community.’
In such a situation, Ong said that what drives the local waves is not imported infections, “but re-infections of existing individuals in the community.”
When the protection against infection from past infections or vaccinations wanes over time, people get re-infected and that causes the number of cases to rise and a new wave will emerge.
MOH estimates that about 30 per cent of current infections are re-infections, higher than the observed 20 per cent to 25 per cent during the last infection wave.
The ministry will continue to do genetic sequencing of the viral samples.
“There are now multiple variants circulating — XBB, XBB.1.5, XBB.1.9, XBB.1.16, XBB.2.3, BN.1, CH.1.1 — without a clear dominant strain. Of particular interest now is XBB.1.16, also called Arcturus.
“Of all the various strains now, there is really not a single one that we notice is particularly dominant, and there is no evidence showing that any one of them causes more severe illness,” he said.
Ong added the most important aspect of any infection wave is the severity of symptoms and whether patients become hospitalised.
“There has been no evidence showing that any of the current XBB strains cause more severe illnesses,” he said.
The number of hospitalised Covid-19 patients has gone up, from 80 to 220 over the past month ‘but far below the peak of the pandemic.’
“It is also much lower than the number of patients hospitalised due to non-Covid-19 infections.
“ICU (intensive care unit) admissions remain stable and low, with less than 10 Covid-19 patients at any one time over the past month,” Ong said.
— Bernama
