Singapore is making plans to stop counting its daily Covid-19 cases in a roadmap to resuming normal life by treating the virus like any other endemic disease.
The city nation of 5.7 million has so far enforced some of the strictest and most successful pandemic-busting rules on the planet, recording just 36 deaths by curbing the virus through tough border restrictions, lockdowns and mass contact tracing and testing.
But in a nod to the public’s “battle weariness” after 18 months of maintaining a low Covid strategy, three leading members of Singapore’s Covid-19 taskforce have proposed a “roadmap” to return to quarantine-free travel, large gatherings and to end the tally of daily cases.
“Instead of monitoring Covid-19 infection numbers every day, we will focus on the outcomes: how many fall very sick, how many in the intensive care unit, how many need to be intubated for oxygen, and so on. This is like how we now monitor influenza,” wrote the trade, finance and health ministers in a joint op-ed in the Straits Times.
“We can’t eradicate it, but we can turn the pandemic into something much less threatening, like influenza, hand, foot and mouth disease, or chickenpox, and get on with our lives.”
Their broad plan to return to normality relies heavily on controlling infection rates through mass vaccination, shifts in testing methods, better treatments and social responsibility.