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As Covid-19 outbreak starts to resemble global pandemic, travel bans will have limited relevance, says Lawrence Wong

SINGAPORE — The Covid-19 outbreak is “starting to look like a global pandemic everywhere around the world”, at which point it will not be possible to shut Singapore out from the world, National Development Minister Lawrence Wong said on Friday (March 6).

When asked about the possibility of lifting travel restrictions on new visitors, Minister for National Development Lawrence Wong said Singapore will only consider this “if the situation within these countries is clearly very well contained”.

When asked about the possibility of lifting travel restrictions on new visitors, Minister for National Development Lawrence Wong said Singapore will only consider this “if the situation within these countries is clearly very well contained”.

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SINGAPORE — The Covid-19 outbreak is “starting to look like a global pandemic everywhere around the world”, at which point it will not be possible to shut Singapore out from the world, National Development Minister Lawrence Wong said on Friday (March 6).

“What we might do, even when (the disease) becomes more prevalent around the world, is to maintain some level of surveillance as we are doing today at the checkpoints to pick out and identify people with symptoms.

“That might still be one level of control that we can do at the borders, but beyond that, we do need to do more within our own community in Singapore to slow the spread of the virus,” said Mr Wong at a press conference by the Multi-Ministry Task Force that is tackling the virus outbreak, which he co-chairs.

Health Minister Gan Kim Yong, who also co-chairs the taskforce; Environment and Water Resources Minister Masagos Zulkifli; and MOH director of medical services Kenneth Mak were also present at the conference held at the National Press Centre.

Mr Wong was addressing a question about the continued relevance of border controls and travel restrictions, following fresh measures issued on Tuesday to bar the entry of foreign visitors with recent travel history to Iran, northern Italy and South Korea, which have been identified as epidemic centres for the disease outside China.

“You have got to look at two categories: (The first) are the countries that we have already put in place travel restrictions, because we have identified these to be epidemic centres, starting with China and later expanded to a few other countries. To the extent that these countries take effective containment measures... then at some point in time, I think border controls to these countries will no longer be so relevant,” he said, referring to China and South Korea.

Mr Wong said China has been working hard to contain the virus and the number of new cases have gone down, while South Korea is taking proactive testing measures and is also vigilant in containing the spread to other cities.

When deciding on whether to lift travel restrictions on these visitors, Singapore will consider “if the situation within these countries is clearly very well contained” and look at other data and evidence.

The second part is whether to impose new border control measures, such as travel restrictions, targeting new epidemic centres of Covid-19, he said.

“I will not rule it out at this stage, but if you think and project ahead, and indeed if the virus is spreading and not that we have one clear epidemic centre and there are epidemics all around the world and it becomes a global pandemic, then there is no basis for putting together border controls unless we shut ourselves, which we don’t want to,” he said.

Whether Singapore decides to impose these new bans depends on the evolving situation and the usefulness of such restrictions, added Mr Wong.

“At that stage, the bigger risk is not importation of cases from these countries, but the importation of cases from countries that may not have travel restrictions… We are now seeing more cases coming from Europe, we are starting to see more cases in America, so it is starting to look like a global pandemic everywhere in the world,” he said.

Addressing a question on whether lifting these measures at a time when Singapore deems fit to do so would inadvertently cause a surge of visitors from places previously seen as high-risk, Mr Gan said it was important not to see Singapore’s approach to border controls in a “binary way”, since its actions have been incremental.

This is evident in how Singapore has gradually ramped up its restrictions from Wuhan - where Covid-19 was first reported - to Hubei province and then to the rest of mainland China, he said.

Mr Gan also noted how at the checkpoints, Singapore first rolled out temperature screening measures, and later increasing these measures to also conduct swab tests at the borders.

“Even for countries that we have border controls, we may adjust incrementally so it doesn’t mean that if we open the floodgates (by lowering travel restrictions), everybody will come in overnight,” said Mr Gan.

He urged Singaporeans to keep up on personal hygiene efforts, emphasising the critical importance of the new SG Clean campaign launched earlier last month.

A new taskforce, headed by the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources, was announced Friday (March 6) to encourage good personal hygiene, adjust social norms and raise cleaning standards across the country.

Mr Gan said besides measures such as border controls, the SG Clean campaign is in fact Singapore’s first line of defence.

He said: “Whether we have temperature screening or swab tests, it is not a hundred per cent. Even if we have restrictions on travel (from certain countries), we will also have Singaporeans coming back and we can’t stop them from returning to Singapore.

“Therefore, personal hygiene and public health standards are the most important (moves) and that is why we need to push ahead with SG Clean,” he said.

GLOBAL PANDEMIC AN ‘EMOTIVE’ TERM

The World Health Organization (WHO), although avoiding any reference to Covid-19 as a pandemic so far, has nevertheless called upon the world to be prepared for one.

It currently refers to Covid-19 as a public health emergency of international concern. A pandemic, according to WHO definitions, refers to “the worldwide spread of a new disease”.

In a separate interview following the press conference, MOH’s Associate Professor Mak was asked if Singapore would be making representations to the WHO on calling Covid-19 a pandemic.

Dr Mak said the use of the term carries highly emotive overtones, as well as the notion that countries or continents have failed to control the spread of infections within their borders.

“As the WHO has said, there is significant potential for a pandemic to arise, but we may not have reached a stage where individual countries and their local efforts to contain it have failed,” said Dr Mak. He added that it is perhaps more helpful to look at how individual countries are stepping up efforts to control the spread of the virus, and how viruses transmits from one country to another.

On its part, Singapore is collaborating and sharing best practices to tackle Covid-19 with other countries, he said. There is also the possibility to coordinate national strategies across borders on how to respond to the virus — the health ministries of Malaysia and Singapore have formed a joint working committee to fight Covid-19, for example.

“These are areas that we continue to look at seriously and we continue to be in discussion with international health authorities, our sister (agencies) in the region and further out, to see how we can share information and align our measures,” he said.

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Covid-19 coronavirus Wuhan virus border control travel ban

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