In our country, we have just entered into a new and complicated phase of treating pandemic Covid as endemic even as positive cases surged.
Mixed and worrying signals are causing everyone to be confused and fearful at the same time. Markers like unlinked cases that were being tracked for the last 18 months as part of a zero Covid strategy are supposed to be thrown out the window now? This new wave is happening everywhere around the world now. S’pore is entering into a brave new world as one of the first countries to try to plot an endemic strategy.
The Delta variant has upended everyone’s original plan to defeat Covid by summer. What was a viable vaccine herd immunization objective 6 months ago is now being questioned if it was foolhardy to achieve that aim now. Countries are diverging in their national game plans: to maintain a zero Covid objective OR to permanently live with Covid with its future mutations like any other viruses.
For a zero Covid strategy, you have to ring-fence your country to aggressively stop every new case from spreading. On the other hand, the endemic objective is to gradually reopen to face the new normal, risking an uptick in cases. This is the S’pore dilemma now. Everyone is confused as to what we should do next as the new endemic playbook is being rewritten every day.
Our cases have now spiked up to the hundreds in a scary way and new deaths are being recorded. The authorities had been sending mixed messages and trying to adjust as they go along. The old way of noting new unlinked cases is generating fear while we are told not to panic as this is part and parcel of treating it as an endemic now.
I totally understand the need to slowly go back to normal again as our country is so dependent on being linked up to the global economy. As a tiny red dot with no natural resources, we cannot afford to clam up and ignore the rest of the world forever. China can look inwards to support its domestic economy and give the middle finger to other countries as it has a large population size.
The authorities had declared that we will reopen with caution after the delayed National Day rally in Aug. But yet a few weeks later, like most countries, we are starting to see a spike in the new wave, crippling the economic recovery story. Things seem to be going south very rapidly.
There is a group that suggest stronger leadership to continue the reopening as we had reached the vaccine herd immunity level. It suggests that the majority of vaccinated citizens cannot be held hostage to the unvaccinated minority. Businesses are dying fast due to the crushing lockdowns over the last 18 months. They argue that zero tolerance cannot work if we are to move to an endemic strategy.
The other opposing group is saying that cases and unlinked cases are reaching alarming rates too fast, that we should pause, even pull back to revaluate again. We are getting one or 2 deaths every other day and it is mostly from the elderly and unvaccinated. Even as we reached 80% population vaccinated levels, should we protect the remaining 20%?
The newspapers mentioned today that S’pore only has 1,000 ICU beds and perhaps that should be used as a new marker to determine where we are now. Contact tracing, cluster detection and unlink cases were strategies employed previously. Do we question the need to monitor these as we reopen? If getting Covid is going to be more common and less deadly because of the vaccination, should we just hang our hair down and loosen up gradually?
These are confusing days when the ministers are trying to pre-empt us to face in the coming weeks’ thousands of new cases. How did we suddenly arrive at this stage from less than a hundred per day? What has changed so dramatically and did we miscalculated?
There seems to be very little data for the deployment of an endemic policy. S’pore is grappling each and every day to come up with a coherent action plan. There is no playbook to fall back on and we are the experimental guinea pigs. There is fear and confusion everywhere as we hang tight for the unknown ride to the end of the tunnel which has now changed shape and direction.
I really do not have answers to the many unanswered questions that we had been facing in the last 2 weeks and for the next month ahead. Only time will tell if the action steps taken are correct and some guesstimates will have to be taken by the leadership which I hope will be generally correct in the time to come.
On a side note, I had an interesting experience on the crypto front recently. I noticed that I had received some new coins from one of my crypto exchange accounts in late Aug. This is termed a free airdrop which I assumed was to generate interest in the multiple new ones that were constantly created.
It was XEC, a recently rebranded version of eCash. Out of curiosity and a feeling that it could be the next meme shitcoin to be exploited, I just bought a bunch of them as a speculation wager and just to sit back and watch the fireworks, if it happens at all. It did not disappoint and lo and behold, the value shot up by more than 5x a few weeks later. I sold a little and am now watching the price retracement to see if there is more upside to the wild ride.
We will be going for our 2nd cruise to nowhere vacation next week. With limited options to travel and wanting to spend time with my older son before he goes back to the UK for his studies next month, we thought it will be a nice break for him as he had just finished his internship attachment.
Leave a Reply