Singapore ‘watching’ for new mutations as China casts off zero-Covid: ‘we worry’
- Health Minister Ong Ye Kung has urged more people in the city state to get vaccinated – especially the elderly and vulnerable – as China opens up
- He said there was ‘worry’ in Singapore about ‘what kind of mutations may come out of China’, though a health expert said not to be ‘overly’ concerned
Visiting one of the newly deployed mobile vaccination teams at Hong Kah North Community Centre on Monday, Health Minister Ong Ye Kung said that “everything in general is calm, but at the same time, we also wanted to be prepared”.
On December 6, the Ministry of Health announced that eight mobile vaccination teams would be deployed progressively starting from Monday to encourage the elderly to get vaccinated.
Ong said that even though things were calmer coming out of the most recent infection wave, Singapore needed to be prepared for potential challenges.
He said that as the northern hemisphere winter approached, there would be increased hospital loads due to the spreading of diseases, and the reopening of China could lead to mutations of the coronavirus.
“They’re taking very decisive steps to open up their economy and society. This [is] bound to drive up infections, which we are not so worried [about], because our resilience is high and we’ve gone through three waves this year.”
“But the question is, with 1.3 billion people mostly uninfected, [when] the disease starts to spread, we are bound to get mutations,” he said.