Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong addressed the nation today (May 31) on the country’s approach to tackling Covid-19.
In a Facebook post, he shared that the address will detail plans to keep Covid-19 under control, while progressively opening up the economy again.
He said that barring another “superspreader event or big cluster”, the nation should be on track to bring the virus under control. Singapore has been in Phase 2 Heightened Alert for the past three weeks, but the number of daily cases has since went down.
PM Lee said that the authorities should know for sure “in a week or so” whether the outbreak is under control.
He added that Covid-19 restrictions should be relaxed after June 13 if all goes well. In the meantime, he called on everyone to keep up their efforts, remain vigilant, work from home if possible, and go out only if necessary.
He urged those who are unwell should see a doctor immediately, even if they have been vaccinated.
Singapore is now fighting more infectious variants of the virus
PM Lee noted that while Singapore is now in a better position to tackle Covid-19 than it was a year ago, which has enabled it to avoid a full circuit breaker, it is now battling new, more infectious variants of the coronavirus.
For instance, the B117 variant, which was first detected in Britain, has become widespread in the United States and many other countries.
Singapore is also dealing with the B16172 variant, which was first detected in India and is now in more than 50 countries, said PM Lee, adding that more variants will inevitably emerge and need to be dealt with.
Therefore, Singapore needs to do three things — more and faster — to keep its defences up: testing, contact tracing, and vaccinating.
Featured Image Credit: Ministry of Communications and Information
