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Coronavirus: Singapore watches ICU capacity amid rise in cases; Philippine schools set to reopen
- The next one to two weeks ‘will be critical’ for the city state, Finance Minister Lawrence Wong said in a Facebook post late on Sunday
- Elsewhere, researchers in northern Cambodia are collecting samples from bats in bid to better understand the coronavirus pandemic
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Singapore’s leaders are closely watching the city state’s intensive care capacity to make sure its hospital system will not be overwhelmed, as reported Covid-19 cases breached the 1,000 mark for a second consecutive day, cabinet ministers said.
The next one to two weeks “will be critical,” Finance Minister Lawrence Wong said in a Facebook post late on Sunday. Health Minister Ong Ye Kung said in a separate post that while ICU capacity is “still holding up,” accident and emergency departments and general wards in hospitals are coming “under pressure”. Both sit on Singapore’s Covid-19 task force.
Singapore’s plan to shift away from a Covid-19 elimination strategy, towards living with the disease as endemic, relies on limiting serious cases through mass vaccination. The current increase could test that strategy. The number of serious cases in ICU or in need of oxygen supplementation more than doubled to 139 as of Sunday, from 61 a week ago.
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“There is no doubt that if our people had not come forward in big numbers to vaccinate ourselves, our health care system would have been overwhelmed by now,” Ong said.
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Singapore’s public acute hospitals had more than 9,600 beds for inpatient care as of 2020. Among hospitals tracked by the health ministry, the beds occupancy rate ranged between 76 per cent and 88 per cent as of September 11.
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