SINGAPORE does not plan to shutter its borders in the face of the Omicron virus variant, Health Minister Ong Ye Kung disclosed on Monday (Jan 10). Similarly, any tightening of domestic safe management measures will be a last resort, he added.

Despite the emergence of Omicron, he reiterated that the key objective "remains to live with Covid-19 as an endemic disease", as he replied to more than a dozen questions from across the House on Singapore's latest approach to Covid-19 containment and vaccination.

"We cannot, for example, over-liberalise social activities, remove all restrictions, let infections rise uncontrollably and leave the healthcare system to bear the consequences," Ong said.

"Neither do we swing to the other extreme - protect the healthcare system at all cost, go for a zero-Covid strategy, and lock down our borders and society - which will cause tremendous suffering to our people."

Among the questions for the health minister was a request from People's Action Party Member of Parliament (MP) Foo Mee Har (West Coast GRC) for an update on the Republic's ability to cope with rising infections by the highly mutated and contagious Omicron virus variant.

Meanwhile, Workers' Party (WP) MPs Louis Chua (Sengkang GRC), Dennis Tan (Hougang) and Gerald Giam (Aljunied GRC) asked what measures would be taken to contain Omicron, compared with earlier variants, and how it would affect the endemic approach to Covid-19.

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Ong told Parliament that the responses that had been developed against the earlier Delta variant will continue to be relevant against Omicron - which now makes up about 40 per cent of all local Covid-19 cases in Singapore, up from 17 per cent the week before.

Vaccination and boosters remain key, while Singapore is preparing to ramp up capacity and manpower at public treatment and recovery facilities such as hospitals, he said.

Ong noted that 555 of Singapore’s 802 Covid-19 deaths in 2021 were individuals who had not been fully vaccinated. Meanwhile, Janil Puthucheary, Senior Minister of State for Health, pointed to the lower risk of severe illness for children, as just 3,145 of the 15,540 children under 12 who were infected in 2021 landed in a hospital or treatment facility.

Ong also disclosed that the Republic could stand up as many as 350 intensive care unit beds, 2,000 isolation beds and 4,000 community treatment beds with a few weeks' notice.

Singapore has also signed or is in the process of negotiating supply agreements for oral antiviral medications, though details are unavailable for confidentiality reasons, he added.

Safe management measures are the third pillar of Singapore's strategy, with vaccination-differentiated measures in lieu of across-the-board social restrictions - though there are no plans to differentiate measures by vaccination status for children aged 12 and below.

Ong, who called it “too rigid to set metrics and parameters to trigger social restrictions”, maintained in a later response to Chua that “we also don’t want to be too rigid in setting parameters, trigger points, ‘if you cross this, therefore it will shut down’”.

“There's so many twists and turns in this pandemic, we’d rather be a bit more nimble and be able to adapt. But we take the member’s point - and we have always adopted this position - that we don't go for ‘Freedom Day’; neither do we go for zero Covid,” he said, referring to strategies adopted by other countries.

“We want to strike a balance, preserve the healthcare capacity, and at the same time, allow people to live life as normally as possible, businesses to be able to operate and able to survive.”

Ong said that the multi-ministry taskforce on Covid-19 - where he is a co-chair - hoped “that we can ride through the Omicron wave with the current safe management measures posture”.

“If we have to tighten the restrictions, it will be as a last resort and when our healthcare system is under severe pressure,” he said.

Given the heightened transmissibility of Omicron, Ong suggested that daily Omicron cases could double every 2 to 3 days to reach 3,000 in a few weeks - and eventually reach 10,000 to 15,000 cases or more.

Still, Omicron infections appear less severe than Delta, with lower incidence rates of hospitalisation and severe illness, he added.

While many European countries are facing Delta and Omicron waves at the same time, Ong noted that Singapore went through its Delta wave recently so “we are not likely to have to ride through 2 rapidly rising infection waves”.

Collective sacrifices and sound policies meant that “we have overcome perhaps the most difficult part of the pandemic”, he said.

With the growing availability of self-administered rapid tests - for which positive results may not be reflected in official statistics - WP MP Sylvia Lim (Aljunied GRC) asked whether the risk of unreported cases might be “actually quite high”.

To her supplementary question, Ong said that “we can’t report every case” of an endemic disease such as chickenpox, as “that’s what endemicity means”, but added that testing remains important as a consistent measure of virus prevalence in the community.