Skip to main content

Advertisement

Advertisement

Covid-19: Multi-agency taskforce formed to ensure cleanliness culture persists beyond outbreak

SINGAPORE — To ensure that Singapore residents continue to observe good public and personal hygiene even beyond the Covid-19 outbreak, the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources (MEWR) on Friday (March 6) announced a new SG Clean Taskforce.

The taskforce will introduce mandatory cleaning standards from 2021, at places such as preschools, eldercare facilities and hawker centres.

The taskforce will introduce mandatory cleaning standards from 2021, at places such as preschools, eldercare facilities and hawker centres.

Follow TODAY on WhatsApp

SINGAPORE — To ensure that Singapore residents continue to observe good public and personal hygiene even beyond the Covid-19 outbreak, the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources (MEWR) on Friday (March 6) announced a new SG Clean Taskforce. 

The taskforce will introduce mandatory cleaning standards from 2021, at places such as preschools, eldercare facilities and hawker centres. It will also encourage the public to adopt personal hygiene practices among other measures. 

It will build on the work from the SG Clean campaign announced last month, which introduced a cleanliness indicator that has been rolled out at hawker centres and coffee shops nationwide.

Minister for the Environment and Water Resources Masagos Zulkifli said at a press conference on Friday that raised hygiene standards will have to be our “new norms”, and that decontamination of the environment is “a common and shared responsibility”. 

"This is the best way forward because this is how we can carry on with our lives while making some adjustments... What we know now is that from our research… is that the environment contamination is an important factor in the transmission of the virus, but we also found that it is easily decontaminated,” he said. 

The announcement of the new taskforce comes a day after Health Minister Gan Kim Yong said that Singapore “must expect to see significantly higher numbers" of new Covid-19 cases in time to come. 

Speaking in Parliament during the Ministry of Health's (MOH) Committee of Supply debate, Mr Gan said that as the number of cases outside mainland China continues to grow at an “alarming rate”, that Singapore has to adopt a Whole-of-Government approach and mobilise the resources of all the relevant agencies to mount a swift and effective response.

MANDATORY CLEANING STANDARDS

Amendments to the Environmental Public Health Act will be made later this year to introduce mandatory cleaning standards. This will include, for example, details on the frequency at which high-contact areas such as public toilets are cleaned and disinfected. 

In addition, greater accountability will be placed on-premise managers for the cleanliness of their premises. They will be required to submit and implement an environmental sanitation programme and ensure that cleanliness issues on their premises are resolved. 

They will also need to appoint a trained “designated person” to assist them to develop and enforce the environmental sanitation programme. 

The National Environment Agency will also work with sectoral leads to “progressively implement” the new requirements from 2021, starting with higher-risk premises such as preschools, schools, eldercare facilities and hawker centres. 

“The Government will put standards in place and take enforcement action when it is not met,” Mr Zulkifli added. 

ADJUSTING SOCIAL NORMS

The SG Clean Taskforce will also introduce measures to adjust social norms, by encouraging the use of serving spoons when sharing food and keeping tables clean, among other behaviours.

It will also be encouraging the “7 habits of good public hygiene”, which includes washing hands and the daily taking of temperature to reduce the risks of spreading diseases. 

Minister of National Development Lawrence Wong speaking at the press conference said that while improving public hygiene is the “easiest to tackle”, it is personal hygiene and social norms that are “a bit more difficult”. 

“That is why we need everyone to step up… The good news is that we do see habits already changing.” 

The SG Clean Taskforce, which was announced on Friday, builds on the SG Clean campaign launched on Feb 16. 

One component of the campaign is a cleanliness indicator called the “SG Clean quality mark” which is awarded to premises such as hawker stalls and coffee shops that “commit to sector-specific sanitation and hygiene checklists”. 

To date, 1,907 hawker and market stalls, and 345 coffee shop stalls, as well as 13 hawker centres and 49 coffee shops have been awarded the SG Clean quality mark.

Said Mr Wong: “Increasingly, social efforts become an important line of our defence, what we do within Singapore.”

“That is why this SG Clean campaign is vital to Singapore… They seem simple but they really seem to have an effective way of slowing down the virus.” 

In a Facebook post on Friday, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong also wrote about the importance of hygiene and cleanliness.

"More and more people are getting infected all over the world. Singapore has restricted travellers from badly hit countries, but we can’t close our borders completely. So we must expect more cases and clusters to pop up in Singapore," he wrote. 

He said while Singapore has been quite successful in identifying patients, tracing contacts and stamping out clusters, we also need to slow the spread of the virus and that means raising hygiene standards.

"Better hygiene must be our first line of defence," he wrote. 

 

Related topics

Covid-19 coronavirus hygiene SG Clean

Read more of the latest in

Advertisement

Advertisement

Stay in the know. Anytime. Anywhere.

Subscribe to get daily news updates, insights and must reads delivered straight to your inbox.

By clicking subscribe, I agree for my personal data to be used to send me TODAY newsletters, promotional offers and for research and analysis.