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Singapore a Rare Lodestar in Coronavirus Fight

Zsombor Peter

   KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA - On Jan. 23 Singapore became one of the first
   countries after China to report a case of the new coronavirus -- a
   66-year-old man who had brought the deadly pathogen with him three days
   earlier from the Chinese city of Wuhan.
   Since then, the World Health Organization has labeled the speedy spread
   of the virus across the globe a pandemic, with major outbreaks
   numbering into the thousands from Iran to the United States and over
   much of Europe. Singapore, meanwhile, a major regional travel hub and
   trade transshipment point with 5.6 million tightly packed inhabitants,
   has reported only 345 cases as of March 19 and no deaths.
   "That's a very good achievement," said Dr. Ying-Ru Jacqueline Lo, the
   WHO representative for Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore.
   Along with Hong Kong and Taiwan, the Southeast Asian city-state has
   earned high praise for its early and thorough response to COVID-19.
   Although the number of confirmed cases continues to mount on the island
   daily, most new reports are still being linked to people arriving with
   the infection from abroad.
   Authorities "were very transparent [about] what was known or unknown
   and what they were going to do and what the public could do, and that
   started very early," Lo said.
   Jeremy Lim, co-director of global health at the National University of
   Singapore's Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, credits that
   response in large measure to the country's traumatic experience with
   SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, a deadlier relative of
   COVID-19.
   A global SARS outbreak in 2003 infected 238 Singaporeans and killed 33,
   more than anywhere else besides mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and
   Canada.
   "The experience of SARS is viscerally seared into the individual as
   well as the collective consciousness," Lim said.
   "Many of us lost friends, we have close friends, relatives who have
   been infected, and I think that the sentiment after SARS was, never
   again -- we must be better prepared the next time."

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