TR EMERITUS

Many people are worried about a handful of imported cases (of covid infected) that are reported daily.

They do not need to be concerned.

Most of these cases are mild (i.e. asymptomatic). A few cases are symptomatic.

The travelers were asked to be isolated in the Stay At Home notices.

Why am I not concerned about the spread of the infection?

Look at the statistics in this website.

Singapore already encountered over 58,000 infected cases since the start of the pandemic.

They do not cause a sharp increase in deaths (apart from the 28 deaths, mostly of elderly people that were infected in the earlier months).

If we managed to survive 58,000 infections, we do not need to be concerned about a handful that appears each day. We will be able to survive these new cases. It will not spread wildly.

This is my interpretation of the statistics. If the spread is very bad, we can see it in various figures of hospital admissions and deaths. But it has not happened.

I do not over-react to risks and take extreme measures. I look at what is happening.

I also compare our figures with the figures of over 100 countries around the world. You can see these figures from this webpage. [LINK]

I am convinced that in countries with daily temperature above 25 C, the corona virus is mild. The death rate per million of population is less than 100.

For countries with colder climate, the death rate could be over 500 per million.

What is the death rate in Singapore? It is 5 per million. More people die from road accident than from covid-19.

What about the death rate in Malaysia? We are alarmed at the high infection and deaths, right? It is 10 per million.

What about India. Most people get the impression that the covid-19 deaths are high. It is less than 100 per million.

What is my conclusion?

We need to distinguish between mild infection (which represents the majority of the cases in Singapore) and serious infections – which require hospital care.

The serious infections are mostly symptomatic – i.e. fever, dry cough and breathing difficulty. These are few – due to my observation that the corona virus is mild in the warm weather.

We can remove the circuit breaker now. We hardly have any infection for the past two weeks. We do not need to be concerned about the few imported cases. They will not cause much harm.

We still need to adopt social distancing. We still need to encourage the vulnerable people (i.e. elderly and those in poor health) to take precautions. They should stay away from crowds and wear masks (even at home when they meet with family members).

The rest of the population can treat the corona virus like the flu virus. I am referring to Singapore – due to our warm climate. I know that the corona virus is more lethal in cold climates.

I hope that people will pay attention to the statistics and not over-react to the dangers (which may be imaginary).

Tan Kin Lian

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