Where Do We Go From Here? – Week 10

We are almost 6 months into the first case of Covid-19 and the light at the end of the tunnel is nowhere in sight yet.

Everyone is getting used to the new norms, that we have entered into a brave new world where the old way of doing things will fade away. Each and every living human on Planet Earth has been impacted by this situation. It is a black swan once in a 100 years event. To starve the virus, we had to shut the world down.

The 1st bright spot here so far is that 90+ groups around the world are now racing to address Covid-19 in various ways – testing, treatment and vaccine. There is still so much we do not know about this invisible enemy. The 2nd bright spot is that Gaia is finally given a pause to rejuvenate itself, to hopefully reduce the impact of climate change naturally. The air seems to smell fresher and the trees greener in my daily runs.

Now to the serious stuff. I pride myself as an eternal optimist but yet the facts before me are still negative for now. Zero leadership and world coordination means that we lose valuable time as we muddle along. Positive learning experiences from some countries are not passed on in a uniform way to implement across the globe. Some are still sticking their heads in the sand.

Watching American news depresses me every day. Chaos is caused by the man at the top, who seemed to be totally out of his depth and may suffer a nervous breakdown soon. Pushing witch doctor cures and denying the facts seems to be the solution for everything. It looks like no one is bothering to stand up to his ever more ridiculous actions anymore.

To declare victory and go back to normal to open the economy against the advice of medical experts is a ticking time bomb waiting to splash shit on everyone’s face. They don’t get it that the probability of 2nd and 3rd waves of infections are highly probable. Look at the examples from China, S’pore and South Korea, for goodness sake!

The main solution at the moment, absent of a vaccine, is to test, test and do more test. Testing kits and material are in short supply everywhere. Turnaround time for results in some places is still in the number of days. Most require hours and the quality of the test kits are sometimes questionable.

Let’s just look at the logistics of this and use S’pore as an example. Last week, we were told that our daily capacity for testing per day has gone up from 2,900 to 8,000 over the last month. They are now trying to push for 20 to 40k levels as soon as possible – this is really a high KPI given the shortage of kits and reagent materials available.

We have an FW (Foreign Workers) situation at the moment that flared up last month in the dormitories where they are putting up. There are 300,000 of them. As of last week, only about 30k have been tested and the infection rate was very high (30 to 40%). Luckily, most of them are young and healthy due to the manual work that they do and none are in ICU care yet. So if you have another 270k to test at a rate of 8k/day, that is another 34 days more before you are done. That does not include testing for other non-FW population ie. citizens. In totality, we have probably about close to a million FW working here. By the way. S’pore’s overall population is 7 million. To do aggressive testing will really take a long, long time.

The next question to ask is “What is the point of the testing?”. Asymptomatic carriers with no signs are still the main worry. It only requires one infected person to undo all the aggressive testing again. Our porous borders mean that the virus could slip in anytime as we open up. Until a vaccine is discovered, isn’t testing pointless?

Then again, we cannot just sit there and wait for herd immunity to happen, like in Sweden. More will die as a result. But what other solutions do we have now? We just need to buy more time. Though we know more now about the virus than 2 months ago, there is still much more we need to learn.

We are now more than halfway through our extended circuit breaker lockdown (32/55). Partial opening up is likely to be the way from here. If we see a surge in cases again, we will have to take 2 steps back and observe again. This could last a while as we cautiously move ahead until a vaccine is found.

Meanwhile, like a horror show that we all know how the ending will be, we can see a high probability of the 2nd wave hitting many areas very soon, especially in America. I really salute the front line staff who are still bravely fighting the war with no ending in sight yet. For the Covidiots who are selfishly fighting for their me first “freedom”, I say we should ship all of them to a remote island where they are free to practise all their 2nd amendment rights there.