Singapore Begins Its “Living with COVID” Strategy

Singapore has abandoned the zero COVID strategy some countries are pursuing and instead focusing on hospitalization rates and not case numbers:

Singapore reported a total of 93 deaths from COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic through Wednesday. Across the narrow Straits of Johor, neighbor Malaysia counted more than double that number on Wednesday alone.

Malaysia has reported 798 COVID-19 deaths per million residents since the start of the pandemic; Singapore fewer than 16.

After one of the most successful vaccination rollouts in the world, and the pandemic brought well under control with strict regulations and aggressive testing and tracking, Singapore began in August what it calls a “transition journey to a COVID-19 resilient nation.”

In doing so, the wealthy Southeast Asian nation of 5.5 million people tacitly conceded that reducing cases to zero was not a possible long-term solution, and instead decided it could start a gradual return to everyday life, said Tikki Pang, a visiting professor of infectious diseases at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore and a former World Health Organization researcher.

“In the longer term, it is really going to become the norm,” he said of the approach. “Because I think most governments of most countries will accept the fact that this virus is not going to go away, it’s going to become endemic and we’re just going to have to learn to live with it like the flu.”

Associated Press

You can read more at the link, but Singapore’s high vaccination rate is helping it keep its hospitalization and death rate well below neighboring countries. This has given the nation confidence to reopen and try to return to normal.