Covid-19 crisis Covid-19 infection rate in the community
What is the infection rate of covid-19 in the community.

The WHO statistics showed that 94,796 tests were carried out in Singapore and 10,141 (10.7%) were found to be infected. 

The 94,796 tests can be broken down into four groups:

a) Foreign workers living in dormitory
b) People who were sick 
c) People who came into contact with infected people through contact tracing
d) Others - i.e. the random group

The random group (d) are people who are tested because of employment reasons, e.g health worker, patients visiting clinics (but not for covid reasons). The infection rate could represent the general population.

Each of the four groups will have different rates of infection (i.e. tested to be positive). 

The ministry of health should segregate the people in the random group (d) and find out the infection rate. I expect it to be 3% to 5%.

If 3% of the general population is infected, it means 170,000 people have already been infected. 

There is no cause for alarm. In most cases, the infection is mild that the infected people were not aware about it. They do not need to be hospitalized for treatment. 

We should pay attention to the deaths (total of 12) and the patients in ICU (24). These are small numbers. We only need to worry if these numbers increase exponentially every few days. So far, it has remained stable. 

If 170,000 people in the community has already been infected, we should stop contact tracing and end the circuit breaker. We should adopt other measures to deal with the virus - such as strengthening the social distancing measures and face mask protection. This strategy has been adopted successfully in S Korea and Taiwan.

The good news is that the virus is not lethal (which accounts for the small number of deaths and ICU cases) in Singapore. We should not be alarmed about the large number of infected people.

Tan Kin Lian
 

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