Definition of “Asymptomatic”: People who are contagious but not physically sick (no symptoms).
Watched some (got bored and switched off) of yesterday’s daily Sg. govt update and thought I’d guess what happened in Dormitories and relate to the Sg. community.
Say, at point date, 15 Apr 2020, 20% of said 200,000 migrant workers have had the virus. This equates to 40,000. Clearly there is a gradient, starting from ground zero (one person) in early Jan 2020. Exponential growth (the gradient / trend) would have seen this figure rise to (say) 30,000 by late March 2020 and 40,000 today, 15 Apr 2020.
This infection rate could be analogous to Sg. as a whole.
Thus, Pop. 5m; 20% = 1m infected and recovered.
So why the alarm?. We should be rejoicing. The only way to beat this virus is where perhaps we attain 30-40% infection rate then the virus has difficulty finding a host. It's a long haul
However, caution.
Most migrant workers are young and healthy so many are likely to have mild symptoms or no symptoms. They are “doctor shy”. This is not true of the wider Sg. population.
Singaporeans have, by comparison, wide space at home, work and play.
Nevertheless if say 20% of the Sg. pop has had the virus then 1m are safe to go back into society immediately. Problem is, we do not know the real figure.
(I will post a new topic on “testing” later).
I am not discussing mask or other non pharmaceutical interventions in this thread but I observe that for the period Jan – March 2020 no-one wore a mask yet now the science is suggesting that many more people were asymptomatic than was hitherto realised. This has profound implications for the timing of our release from the Circuit Breaker.
