As Covid-19 rages on, is Singapore risking too much to host the World Economic Forum?

Name: Singapore begins national Covid-19 vaccination programme
Uploaded: 2021-01-22T00:00:22.000Z
Duration: 2 min 3 s
Description: Singapore begins national Covid-19 vaccination programme

More than a thousand foreigners are expected to arrive in Singapore for a tennis event, Davos 2021 and the Shangri-La Dialogue in the coming months

Health experts say regular testing for inbound travellers and segregating them from the community will be key

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Singapore seems to have contained Covid-19 infections far better than the United States or countries in Europe. Photo: AP

Dewey Sim

Published: 8:00am, 22 Jan 2021Updated: 3:21pm, 22 Jan 2021

In the coming months, more than a thousand government officials, business leaders and sportspeople are expected to flock to Singapore, a nation that seems to have contained Covid-19 infections far better than the United States or countries in Europe, for various events.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) will hold its annual gathering there in May, the first time it will be held in Asia and just the second edition to take place outside Switzerland since its inception in 1971. The following month, the Shangri-La Dialogue – an Asian security summit that was cancelled last year because of the pandemic – will kick off.

And next month, tennis players from around the world are expected to head to Singapore, after the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) on Wednesday announced it would hold an event in the city state. More than 70 tennis professionals are currently locked down in Melbourne after positive coronavirus tests were returned from charter flights that brought them to the Australian Open.

As Covid-19 continues to rage across most of the world, all eyes are on how Singapore will proceed with the events without sparking a fresh wave of imported infections, while health care experts are urging the government to adopt more aggressive measures to keep the virus at bay.

Infectious diseases expert Dr Leong Hoe Nam said Singapore needed to “proceed with caution”, pointing out that if the number of coronavirus cases in some countries remained high, officials from those nations might decide to withdraw from the events. Britain, for example, had its deadliest day on Wednesday after a surge in Covid-19 deaths, with officials describing hospitals as a “war zone”.

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Singapore begins national Covid-19 vaccination programme

“It is embarrassing to send an infected official over,” Leong said, adding that participants are also closely watching the number of coronavirus cases in Singapore. Even though the country has managed to keep locally transmitted cases low in recent months – with just 11 in November and 14 last month – there has been a slight jump in infections in recent days, with three local clusters in the past three weeks.

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