Coronavirus: Singapore says it’s given 60,000 vaccine shots, as it tightens social distancing curbs ahead of Lunar New Year
- While the government will ramp up immunisations, it expects delays to imports of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine
- Meanwhile, shops in Chinatown will be monitored ahead of the Lunar New Year, and a cap on eight daily household visitors will begin on January 26
This figure included staff working in the health care sector and in frontline and essential services, the health ministry said.
In Southeast Asia, only Singapore and Indonesia have so far started their vaccination drives, with the latter inoculating 60,815 people as of Wednesday, according to an Indonesian senior health ministry official.
Singapore’s health ministry said its next steps would involve vaccinating senior citizens from the end of January.
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“We will continue to monitor our supplies closely to meet our targets of vaccinating all Singaporeans and long-term residents in Singapore by the end of this year,” he said. “We will need to calibrate our roll-out in tandem with our supplies.”
Gan declined to comment how many doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine would be disrupted, but said that Singapore had made advance purchases from “diverse sources”, and there was some “buffer” to ensure its vaccination programme would be completed within its timeline.
Currently, only the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has been granted interim approval by Singapore’s Health Sciences Authority, even though officials earlier said they had reached deals with Moderna and China’s Sinovac, without declaring how many doses were secured.
Meanwhile, Singapore also announced that it would tighten Covid-19 restrictions slightly, following a small spike in infections in recent days, with authorities anticipating a further surge as the Lunar New Year holiday nears. The event is the most-celebrated festival in the city state, which has a majority-Chinese population.
In particular, Singapore officials will carry out surveillance testing for stallholders, shop owners, and workers in the food and beverage industry operating in Chinatown, where a string of activities and celebrations are typically held during the Lunar New Year period. Residents usually flock there to buy goodies as well as decorations.
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Authorities also said a new cap of eight distinct visitors per household per day would kick in from January 26, and urged residents to visit a maximum of two households a day.
This would be a “pre-emptive rule”, said education minister Lawrence Wong, the other co-head of the virus task force, to mitigate the risk of large community clusters.
He also advised residents to consider virtual gatherings this Lunar New Year, instead of making physical home visits.
Wong admitted that this new rule could be “hard to enforce” but added that “random checks” would be performed. Already, he said there were neighbours who have informed the police of such regulation breaches in the past.
In addition, face masks must also be worn while tossing yusheng and there should be no shouting of the usual auspicious phrases.
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Singapore begins national Covid-19 vaccination programme
Singapore, which appears to have successfully quashed the virus compared to countries in Europe and the US, detected three local clusters recently, reporting 36 locally-transmitted infections in January so far, more than double the 14 seen in the whole of December. In total, Singapore has 59,236 cases as of Friday.
The Friday announcement came a month after Singapore eased measures, increasing social gatherings from a maximum of five to eight people.
Capacity limits at public places, including malls, places of worship and attractions, for example, were also increased.
