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Comment by shaunkoh | Hacker News Reader

SINGAPORE - The Republic has seen 26 cases of Covid-19 reinfection as Monday (May 10), Health Minister Gan Kim Yong said in a ministerial statement in Parliament on Tuesday.

Such reinfections are known to be possible in both overseas and local cases, he noted, but it is still unclear why they occur.

The minister said investigations are ongoing to determine if reinfections are due to a general waning of immunity levels over time, or a lack of cross-protection, despite a previous infection, against specific variants of the coronavirus that a person is exposed to for the first time.

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/parliament-2...

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Out of ~61,000 cases in Singapore, that would be a reinfection rate of 1 in 2,500. And of those, I'd bet all are mild cases.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

This one's close to my heart since I stay there. At the end of the article:

> there have been 56 cases involving people who were infected despite being fully vaccinated, of which 30 were local cases and 26 were imported ones.

This is key. Fully vaccinated people in Singapore aren't getting seriously sick (which is great!) but they are getting infected with Covid (which isn't so great).

What that means is that fully vaccinated individuals can get infected and infect unvaccinated individuals. As such, your population won't be protected unless most people are vaccinated (80-90%+).

but they are getting infected with Covid (which isn't so great).

The US approved vaccines (so far) appear to be pretty good at preventing infection compared to lots of vaccines.

There's an obvious level of (incomplete) protection present in the population at 50% vaccination. Cases aren't falling because we are getting more careful (but then the nicer weather could be helping).

FWIW, Singapore uses Pfzer-BioNTech and Moderna.

There's a scary situation happening here now for the last 2 weeks or so. There has been new clusters popping up after having been relatively tame for a few months and safety measures have been tightened (slightly, but obviously) again. Some of these cases involve those that has been vaccinated. One lesson that we can learn from this is, coming from a city that is marketed as having handled the situation well — the world is far from being done with dealing with COVID.

Looks like vaccination is around 20% there? With not that many people having acquired immunity from infection.

The US is close to 50%, with another good chunk of people with immunity from infection and our cases are dropping a good deal. The season changing is going to be some of it, but cases are dropping even as activities increase.

I'm not saying it is done, as much as anything because we need billions of doses of vaccine still, but there is lots of reason to be pretty hopeful.

Exactly. It's clear the vaccine protects the people who receive it from serious disease. But people who are vaccinated can get infected and infect others. Therefore we won't see much "back to normal" until most, if not all, people are vaccinated. This wont be one of those "60% and we hit herd immunity" situations.

>coming from a city that is marketed as having handled the situation well

Marketing which is completely bullshit. Singapore has had around ~60k covid cases, 6x more than Hong Kong and 60x more than Taiwan, just somehow the government managed to downplay it as most of the cases were in poor migrant workers and apparently they don't count as people.

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