The national KTV fiasco exploded into all our faces on Sunday for our sunny island. It was a disaster that was waiting to happen.
Again and again, the virus seeks and expose a country’s weakest points and exploit them to the fullest extent possible. Just a small gap is enough for the new variants to wreak havoc on all the well planned months of the national COVID19 strategy. This episode will become a well-studied case study for classrooms for years to come.
Karaoke: a type of interactive entertainment usually offered in clubs and bars, where people sing along to recorded music using a microphone. This phenomenon started as a Japanese invention that had swept Asia for many years.
This behaviour developed into a KTV (Karaoke TV) concept. People who can or cannot sing will gather in a small room, drink lots of alcohol, get blasted and have a good time acting silly while destroying songs with their terrible singing. There are many types of KTVs for all types of clientele. Seedier versions of KTVs with accompanying hostesses became popular places for the entertainment of clients to close business deals all around Asia.
And this is where our national disaster story began. These KTVs had been closed for more than a year when the pandemic started. Business owners had been pleading to the authorities to allow them to open as their survival was at stake with zero income for months.
A compromise was reached more than a month ago when they were allowed to reopen as F&B (Food and Beverage) outlets instead. The idea was to convert them into a viable business model that had safety procedures in place against the virus. But old habits die hard and a leopard does not change its spots so easily overnight.
The KTVs still operate with multiple small rooms for private groups where anything goes inside. Close proximity is unavoidable when many are crammed into each room. The free flow of alcohol does amazing things to the human mental state of mind. Coupled that with many female foreigners on social visit passes looking to making a quick buck as hostesses who are currently stuck in S’pore and a perfect storm is formed.
Many people who have been locked up in their homes for months suddenly had an outlet to go back to the good old days of singing their hearts out with a PYT (Pretty Young Thing) sitting beside them feeding them fruits and praising their singing prowess. Masks are taken off, social distancing becomes impossible. Hostesses work the KTV rooms and even visit multiple locations to maximize their nightly earnings. It just takes one positive case to quickly spread to many people as Delta is more contagious than the original strain.
We had seen this similar situation being played out before in HK (rich Tai-tais and foreign male dancers), Seoul (gay bars) and Taiwan (seniors seeking companionship). Most initially refused to come forward for testing because of the embarrassment and stigma of being associated with an activity that resulted in the spread of the virus.
Most who came up for testing even gave fake names and contact numbers which the authorities couldn’t get in touch with when the results came back positive a few days later. Governments had to resort to promising anonymous testing later as a desperate attempt to trace and quarantine positive cases before the virus spread out of control.
And here we are again in S’pore, promising anonymous testing to all the hot-blooded males who visited the identified KTVs. Many memes flooded my WhatsApp chat groups. Some were hilarious for me to watch but agonizing to those who were at these KTVs.
One guilty party had worked in a satay store at Lorong 5, Toa Payoh. He quickly became the poster boy and the perfect alibi for all the distressed husbands and boyfriends. “Honey, I visited this satay store and that is why I got the SMS to go for testing….”
Thanks to the TraceTogether app, authorities managed to triangulate and pinpoint possible suspects to send notices for testing and quarantine. To date, they had managed to quarantine 2,048 persons. Imagine a group of fully clothed PPE personnel coming knocking at your door to lead you to quarantine in front of all your neighbours. So much for anonymous testing.
There was another fallout to this episode. The cruise to nowhere by Genting had to come back early when one passenger was tested positive. It was discovered that the person is likely linked to the KTV cluster. They had a mini-lockdown and the last passengers could only disembark much later.
As of now, this KTV cluster of positive cases has grown to 120. My group of friends who met on Thurs for dinner are doing a side bet on what would be the final tally of this cluster. It is worrying that not all would step forward to be tested for fear of embarrassment and arrest. We need only one such case to result in many more being infected.
The recently announced reopening process was just tightened again yesterday. The push to 75% of the population to be fully vaccinated now becomes more urgent. It will be the only viable medium-term solution to combat this virus cycle besides more testing. The national strategy for COVID19 is now 3 pronged – Test, Trace and Vaccinate while we wait for the rest of the world to catch up.
A new National Geographic article just highlighted a new variant called Lambda that is spreading in South America now. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-unusual-lambda-variant-is-rapidly-spreading-in-south-america-heres-what-we-know?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=Science_20210714&rid=3874980ACBC3584D7640DCF59882D61B
Covid19 is here to stay and the pandemic will become endemic. It will be a way of life like what the annual flu shots have become as viruses characteristically mutant over time. We are also discovering new things every few months in the fight against this virus and have to always remain vigilant always.
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