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Comment by colmvp | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually slightly worried as Singapore seemed to have handled the crisis quite well with only 1000ish cases for the longest time, but have now had cases balloon from only around 1350 total cases two weeks ago to 6000 today.

Certainly, a lot of it has to with migrant workers and their living situations, but it also underscores how even when you have things under control, the virus can spread rapidly when your guard is down.

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Tbh, SG should have never let people come particularly from countries with covid outbreaks during March. While spreading across the dorms is a big part of the internal spreading, it's clear the outbreak that started in March were clusters involving people coming to sg from abroad.

Almost everyone shut down travel from China (particularly Wuhan) but no one shut down travel from Europe during March. Biggest mistake ever. I don't know enough if it was tourists or whether it was returning Singaporeans but they should have instructed them to remain where they were for the sake of the country.

> but no one shut down travel from Europe during March. Biggest mistake ever

The USA did shut their border to a lot of Europe in early March. But at the time the WHO opposed border closure.

Kind of - it closed the borders for Europeans traveling to the US, but did little to manage Americans returning from abroad. Given March is winter in the US (thus less tourism), I would imagine the majority of Europe -> US traffic at the time is Americans returning home, that's a rather weak closure.

I think you are diminishing the amount of traffic between Europe and US on any given day. Closing the borders to Europe may very well have saved us from catastrophe. Numbers exploded everywhere in March.

>I would imagine the majority of Europe -> US traffic at the time is Americans returning home, that's a rather weak closure.

Over 10 million a year from Germany, Italy, Spain, France, and UK alone. Just tourist visas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_the_United_States#V...

>at the time

My point was that tourism to the US is probably not uniform throughout the year, and March is likely on the lower end of tourism. Hence the ratio of traffic being Americans returning home is higher.

The vast majority of people entering Singapore in March were Singapore citizens returning. A lot of them were students who came back because the schools had closed.

The mistake was not letting them it, but to let them self-quarantine at home. This led to them infecting other family members who then spread it further.

This has changed now as anyone entering Singapore has to be quarantined in a separate facility.

Why is letting them stay where they were an issue? The country (an isolated island, Palau) where my parents are from did that even for students and it's kept covid19 from reaching there till now. Given their situation, they can't afford any cases at all until there's a vaccine. I get you care about your citizens abroad but it's clear that's where all the hotspots in sg turned up in March.

Because not letting your own citizens enter your country is something very few countries do willfully.

As I mentioned in the previous post, they now quarantine them in dedicated facilities for 2 weeks.

It will be fine as long as the medical system is prepped to handle surge/moving overflow smoothly/pulling in and sharing resources etc. Remember most positives won't require hospitalization (~50% wont even show any symptoms, 40% will have mild symptoms). And compared to few months back readiness/awareness levels at hospitals is much higher.

> ~50% wont even show any symptoms

It is closer to 20% A lot of articles stating more are mis-interpreting those numbers from prospective studies. It is possible that the authors of such studies would downplay false positives as well.

I think they don't know yet, even the US were saying it might be 25-50% a couple of days ago. For example the testing of the aircraft carrier, one of the few cases of total population testing, showed 60% asymptomatic cases but had a young population, and it's not clear from the information we've heard publically if some of those will develop symptoms later.

So at the moment no-one really knows for certain.

60% asymptomatic at the time of testing

Most of them will eventually begin showing symptoms

50% keeps recurring because multiple mass testing efforts found that half of tested people were asymptomatic. However, that is mostly a function of a long incubation period. A significant portion of the infected developed symptoms later.

Iceland did random sampling and while it showed 50% asymptomatic at the time of testing, only 15% ended up not showing symptoms at all

Same thing is true for Japan. Everything seems fine for a while, and suddenly the numbers explode.

Mysteriously right after the Olympics were postponed.

Nobody believed Japan. Trump had to call Abe to consider postponement and Canada was the first country to announce they wouldn't send their athletics to the summer Olympics in Tokyo on March 22.

Couldn't find a better page, but according to a past version of wikipedia table[1], as of Mar 31, Japan had tested 32,497 people. The US had tested 1,108,500; South Korea, 410,564.

A lot of people were perplexed by Japan's lack of testing. Seems like Japan's strategy (whatever it was) didn't work out in the end.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:COVID-19...

Under testing always fails. You can’t defeat an invisible enemy.

The calm before the storm happens in countries that are not testing people adequately. The numbers seem to explode when they really start testing.

South Korea is still testing aggressively. Recently they even started re-testing recovered patients. Those who tested positive had their contacts traced and tested too. As long as they remain vigilant, they will not see another big explosion. They seem to have the right attitude.

I’m waiting to see if there will be a little outbreak as a result of the elections they held recently.

Almost all new cases are from clusters in dormitories for migrant workers. They live very close together in those locations, and things will spread very fast.

Numbers outside these locations are going down because of the recent "circuit breaker" they introduced a few weeks ago.

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