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Coronavirus pandemic
AsiaSoutheast Asia

Coronavirus level in Singapore ‘unknown’, US CDC says; Australia’s cases keep spiralling

  • The public health agency reinstated the city state as a highest Covid-19 risk level destination
  • Elsewhere, a government survey found that almost nine in 10 Indonesians have developed antibodies against Covid-19

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People wait in line at a Covid-19 testing site in Melbourne, Australia, on Wednesday. Photo: EPA-EFE
Agencies
The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday reclassified its Covid-19 travel advisory for Singapore, guiding Americans to avoid travel to the Southeast Asian city state because the level of the disease there is “unknown.”

The change stems from a lack of testing data that the CDC used to get from data aggregator Our World in Data. That information has not been updated since November 8, the health agency said in a statement.

The designation came as a surprise in Singapore, which maintains far stricter testing and social distancing measures than in the US, and where the city state’s Ministry of Health posts detailed virus statistics, in English, on its website every day.

“I do think it’s bizarre,” said Ooi Eng Eong, a professor of emerging infectious diseases at Duke-NUS Medical School, adding that Singapore tests so much that “we know more than what most people look for.”

“Clearly some are more comprehensive than others, and I would think that Singapore is among those that are extremely comprehensive in our surveillance,” said Ooi.

Singapore, which was previously classified under the CDC’s highest Covid-19 risk level, has seen local cases fall from more than 4,000 a day in late October to less than 400 a day now. It has resisted closing its borders again amid a surge of imported Omicron cases that have arrived from the US and Europe, where the variant is widespread.

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