SINGAPORE — The Government will pilot a new set of rules for sports settings from Wednesday (Nov 10) onwards, to allow team sports to resume for a group of up to 10 fully vaccinated persons to play together in controlled and supervised settings. These will be at suitable ActiveSG sports centres and community clubs under the People’s Association.

The new Covid-19 regulations will require all participants to be fully vaccinated and they must produce a valid negative antigen rapid test result on-site before the sports activity. 

National sports body Sport Singapore will release more details later.

The Ministry of Health (MOH) said in a press release on Monday (Nov 8) that the combined vaccine-related controls and pre-activity testing will also be piloted at selected mass sporting and meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions events. 

“If successful, we can expand such pilots to additional settings.” 

The ministry also said that it will be taking steps towards letting schools resume more activities.

This is in preparation for the larger-scale safe resumption of co-curricular learning activities in the coming school year, because “these are critical for the nurturing of well-rounded students”.  

The Ministry of Education (MOE) said in a press release on Monday that it will be allowing selected educational institutes to conduct masked activities in sub-groups of up to five persons, subject to existing regulations, from Wednesday onwards.

These institutes are: 

• Secondary schools 
• Secondary or senior sections of special education schools
• Junior colleges and Millennia Institute 
• Institutes of higher learning  

The resumption of team sports will follow the same guidelines announced by MOH.

A review of the outcomes from allowing masked activities and team sports to resume will be held later this month and next month to prepare for the scaling up of these sports activities next year, MOE said.  

EXEMPTIONS FOR MEDICALLY INELIGIBLE PERSONS 

MOH also said on Monday that because there are a few people who are medically ineligible for all Covid-19 vaccines under the national vaccination programme, concessions will be given to this group of people to be exempted from vaccine-related regulations from Dec 1 onwards.

These individuals may visit any general practitioner clinic, or public or private healthcare institution from Nov 15 to be certified as medically ineligible for the vaccines.

However, they will have to fulfil certain conditions:

• They are aged 18 and above and were unable to complete their vaccination regime due to allergies or a previous severe adverse reaction to all vaccines under the national exercise, namely, Pfizer-BioNTech or Comirnaty, Moderna and Sinovac-CoronaVac
• They are below 18 years of age who were unable to complete the vaccination regime due to allergies or a severe adverse reaction to a previous dose of an authorised messenger ribonucleuc acid (mRNA) Covid-19 vaccine, and are unable to take the Sinovac-CoronaVac vaccine
• Persons with or under the following conditions or treatment: ​Transplant within past three months and/or aggressive immunotherapy and/or active cancer on treatment

MOH said that it is working with the Government Technology Agency to reflect the medical ineligibility status in an individual’s TraceTogether contact-tracing mobile application.

This will allow them to pass through the TraceTogether and Safe Entry check-in systems at venues that impose vaccine-related checks without needing to show a paper notice.

MOH said that it will also be introducing vaccine-related controls for residential care homes, given that this is a vulnerable setting where unvaccinated residents are likely to suffer worse outcomes than their vaccinated counterparts if they contract Covid-19.

More details will be announced later, but these measures will apply to areas such as visitations and activities for residents.