SINGAPORE: Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong addressed the nation on Thursday (Mar 24), giving an update on Singapore’s new phase and a “decisive move towards living with COVID-19”.
This is the Prime Minister’s full address –
My fellow Singaporeans,
Our fight against COVID-19 has reached a major turning point. We will be making a decisive move towards living with COVID-19. The multi-ministry taskforce (MTF) will announce the changes after this broadcast. But let me set the context, take stock of our journey thus far and explain our plans moving forward.
We have battled COVID-19 for more than two years now. Right from the start, we had one overriding aim: To protect lives, and prevent as many avoidable deaths as possible.
We saw in other countries bleak images of people desperately seeking admission into hospitals, and healthcare workers being forced to choose who lived and who died.
We were determined to prevent that happening here, and fortunately we have managed to do so. Our healthcare system came under strain, but it was not overwhelmed.
We ensured enough ICU beds and oxygen for everyone who needed them. We recorded one of the lowest rates of COVID-19 related deaths in the world.
This has been a tough fight. With each new wave, we had to move quickly and adapt. Every time we thought we had the pandemic under control, the virus surprised us.
In the early stages, when little was known about the virus, we adopted stringent measures. Our measures kept community cases very low, and helped us to control and clear a major outbreak in our migrant worker dormitories.
We bought time to ramp up our healthcare capacity and roll out a comprehensive national vaccination programme.
Then the more dangerous Delta variant struck. Thankfully, by then our vaccination programme was in full swing.
But we kept strict measures in place to slow the spread of the virus, until we had vaccinated nearly everyone eligible, especially the elderly. Meanwhile, we changed our health protocols to allow mild cases to recover safely at home, relieving the load on our healthcare system.
When we eased up on safe management measures (SMMs), we had a large wave of COVID-19 cases. But by then most Singaporeans had been vaccinated, and were well protected from the Delta variant.
Still, many patients had to be hospitalised, and some unfortunately succumbed to the virus.
Not too long after the Delta wave subsided, the virus threw us another curveball – this time the even more infectious Omicron variant.
We braced ourselves as countries across the world saw record-high cases. Our numbers went up sharply too, at the peak exceeding 25,000 in a single day. With our high vaccination rate and strong healthcare system, we were quietly confident we could cope.
Still, we tightened our border measures and held back easing our SMMs, to give our healthcare system and workers time to respond. We were relieved that Omicron turned out less severe than earlier variants, and that relatively few cases were serious enough to need oxygen support or ICU care.
Over the last two weeks, daily new cases have been coming down. Week on week, the ratio is now around 0.8. At this rate, the number of daily infections will halve in about three weeks.