With a total of over 62,000 infections and just 36 deaths caused by the COVID pandemic, according to data from worldometers.info, Singapore plans to stop reporting daily numbers of infections with the coronavirus. It seems like the officials from the Asian country are justified to treat COVID as flu, judging by these numbers. That’s exactly what they intend, according to The Telegraph.
However, the price for controlling the virus was pretty high: Singapore has imposed some of the toughest pandemic restrictions in the world. As for now, Singapore is about to become the first country in the world that will stop reporting daily COVID cases.
Singapore is slated to announce a further easing of Covid-19 restrictions in mid-July as part of a strategy for reopening the economy https://t.co/3ZExeNG8Tc
— Bloomberg Markets (@markets) July 2, 2021
As quoted by Saraacarter.com, the finance and health minister from Singapore stated:
Instead of monitoring Covid-19 infection numbers every day, we will focus on the outcomes,
How many fall very sick, how many in the intensive care unit, how many need to be intubated for oxygen, and so on. This is like how we now monitor influenza. We can’t eradicate it, but we can turn the pandemic into something much less threatening, like influenza, hand, foot and mouth disease, or chickenpox, and get on with our lives.
There had been a lot of voices in the media for the past 15 months saying that COVID is almost like flu. While those people had to face massive outcry, the medical world has made some progress until now when it comes to learning how to treat the infections with the coronavirus. However, countries worldwide prefer to remain cautious regarding the pandemic, and it will be interesting to see when and if they will follow the same recipe as Singapore.
Looking at the worldwide situation since the pandemic began, there’s a number of over 185 million COVID infections and a total of more than 4 million deaths.