As coronavirus cases surge, can Singapore’s health care system handle the pressure?
- Singapore’s Covid-19 cases have risen sixfold since the start of the month, due to outbreaks in crowded migrant worker dormitories
- The authorities say hospitals can cope for now but are ‘stretched’ amid concerns over availability of beds, testing facilities, ventilators and workers
Experts such as infectious diseases specialist Leong Hoe Nam say hospitals can cope for now, but they are concerned about admissions outpacing the number of discharged patients.
Singapore had 11,321 acute care beds in public and private hospitals as of last year. Official data for last month shows eight public hospitals were at least three-quarters full, but at the time, there were only 802 coronavirus cases and a quarter of these patients had recovered, with some in isolation facilities and 420 in hospitals.
Singapore’s public hospitals were filling up, said Professor Teo Yik Ying, dean of the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Associate Professor Jeremy Lim, from the same school, said last week when there were almost 2,000 cases in hospitals that these represented “more than 15 per cent of all the hospital beds”.
The concern now is how many more infections there are within the migrant worker community, 323,000 of whom live in 43 mega-dormitories and 1,200 smaller ones across the island and do low-wage jobs shunned by Singaporeans. About 4,162 of these workers are infected with the virus, forming close to 70 per cent of the country’s positive cases.