The Western world is slowly opening up after more than a year of hibernation against the virus and Biden was targeting Independence Day as a nationwide reopening date. Then disappointment strikes…
The newly termed Delta variant from India is slowly sweeping through the world and moving westwards. S’pore experienced it more than a month ago and did a mini lockdown in response after multiple unlinked cases surfaced. It was also an indirect function of more testing and the national implementation of electronic contact tracing tokens which I will explain below.
Testing was just 4k/day at the start of the pandemic and it is now boosted up to more than 70k/day. Contact tracing used to be manual and physical tracking teams spent days and weeks interviewing cases and trying to construct cluster maps to solve the unlinked cases. If someone lied, which had happened with a senior married woman who did not want to reveal her close relationship with another man, the undetected link could result in a newer and bigger undiscovered cluster much later. It was a needle in a haystack situation and luck played a large part during those early days where everyone was still trying to figure out how bad the situation actually was.
Pivot to today. With a press of a button on your phone or token, the contact tracing team can upload all the mesh contact data from you, who you have been within 1 meter away from data for the last few weeks. Via Bluetooth, the app notes all the close contacts you have encountered and records the info in your token or mobile. It’s like the Apple AirTag on steroids. Once the data is uploaded to the consolidated master database, the team can triangulate and plot all the human contact maps. They can then trigger the various levels of contacts to alert the affected people to go for testing via SMS or Whatsapp.
For example, if an infected person visited a particular shop or mall during a certain time/date, the team can backtrack to the particular day and trigger an alert to the first, second or even third level of contacts to advise them to go for testing asap. They initially tried to quarantine as many people as possible but this backfired badly as it created chaos and the hotels could not handle the huge surge in demand. As it was mainly young students getting the Delta variant at the beginning, it meant that a parent had to accompany the kid too. This means the immediate doubling of hotel quarantine demand.
Two of my friends told me about the confusion they faced when they were informed via SMS that their kids had to be quarantined. This was followed by days of anxious anticipation, waiting for someone to pick them up, getting their packed bags ready at all times and fruitless calls to the hotline which did not respond with answers.
Thanks to technology and the use of the Bluetooth token mesh data, the huge contact tracing productivity gain (versus manual tracking previously) meant that the authorities were more than ready and a little too “kan-cheong”/trigger happy to activate a targeted lockdown of as many people as possible at the beginning of the Delta surge. The team had to quickly learn to balance between risk and practicality versus trying to contain the Delta virus.
It is still a work in process as the team adjust its strategy accordingly. It learned from HK to lock down certain housing blocks if the evidence points to many cases in the same location. Then it can make all the occupants go for testing to uncover new positive cases to arrest the spread. Delta is more contagious so the turnaround time to detect and contain unlinked cases is more urgent but action plans had to be pragmatic as higher efficiency due to technology advances kick in.
Anyway, S’pore decided to delay its opening and to phase out the restrictions gradually, rather than all at once as we start to see uneven surges in linked and unlinked cases. This makes practical sense. It also helps to manage citizens’ expectations. Even Boris has decided to delay the UK opening by a month now as Delta starts to hit them.
I worry for the western world as Europe and America had begun opening up over the last few weeks even as Asia was hunkering down against Delta. The previous stars of Covid19 containment like S’pore, Taiwan and Vietnam started to have an exponential rise in cases. Taiwan had zero cases for almost 8 months and suddenly had hundreds when their guard was let down. Coupled with low vaccination rates due to insufficient vaccine supplies and a population that is suspicious of the vaccines, the situation had been made worse. S’pore just had Covid19 test kits on sale and some friends had told me that their Taiwan contacts are asking them to purchase and ship them over asap!!
We will start to allow dine-in at eateries starting on Monday after 5 weeks of restrictions, but only for 2 persons at a time. A friend just booked me for lunch on Monday 🙂 Household visitors limit had been raised to 5 this week from 2 for the last 4 weeks. Groups of 5 can go outdoors now. We adjust and do home dinners with 5 friends for now. The pandemic will evolve to become endemic over time, just like the annual flu which will remain with us for a long time. We will have to get used to it and adjust our lifestyles accordingly for a long time. Human nature is highly adaptive and will, in one way or another, be resourceful enough to push through to survive each permutation and variant.
I reached a personal milestone this week by completing my Data Science project for the IBM AI course I had been attending since Feb. Our team was working on it online via Zoom for the last 2 weeks and team presentations to the trainer happened on Wed. We will now go for the Data Science exam in 2 weeks which we are informed will be online now instead of in person at the test center. Our class of 19 had only met in person once at the last exam at end of May and we’re looking forward to meeting up again but the virus had other plans for us, I guess.
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