Circuit Breaker stopped community transmission

It has been four weeks when the Circuit Breaker Stay-at-Home was imposed on 7 April. Back then the daily new cases on 7 April was 106. Total number of confirmed cases was 1,481. We had no inkling that the work permit holders staying in the dormitories were going to present a huge spike of Covid-19 infections in Singapore. The total confirmed cases ballooned to 18,205 as of 3 May.

It would be disastrous if we did not have this mandatory Circuit Breaker stay-at-home measures in place. The work permit holders are confined to their dormitories. The work permit holders and S Pass holders in the construction sectors (not staying in the dormitories) are confined to their homes under the Stay-Home Notices. This way we contained the spread of infections from foreign workers to the community. The infections in the community had come down to an average of 11 cases per day in the past week. The unlinked cases in the community had come down to an average of 5 per day for the past week. This was a significant improvement.

This Circuit Breaker was further extended for another four weeks to end on 1 June. Having gone through four weeks of stay-at-home, have we adjusted to this kind of lives? We will be going through another four weeks of extended circuit breaker.

Because most businesses were shut in April and further closures in May, the impact on Singapore’s economy is going to be unprecedented. First Quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP) had slumped 2.2% year-on-year basis. On the quarter-on-quarter seasonallyadjusted annualised basis, the economy shrank 10.6% (based on advance estimates). Second Quarter GDP will be even worse than the first quarter because of the shut-down of most businesses starting April.

Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic has done serious damage to the Singapore economy and the global economies, much worse than SARS in 2003. Though we have seen some successes in passing the peaks in the spread of infection rates, it will still take significant amount of time to get global economies up to speed pre-Covid-19.

The sacrifices we made in staying at home during Circuit Breaker period is to firstly keep us from getting Covid-19 coronavirus and secondly to get the economy going again so that people can earn a living. We are in it together to fight this pandemic.