US to revise Singapore travel advisory after Covid data flap

[SINGAPORE] The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg Thursday (Jan 6) it is working with Singapore's Ministry of Health regarding the country's Covid-19 testing data and will update its Travel Health Notice for the South-east Asian state accordingly.

The move comes days after the CDC earlier this week reclassified its Covid advisory for Singapore and said the situation there was "unknown".

At issue was a lack of testing findings the CDC previously obtained from aggregator Our World in Data, according to a separate statement from CDC to Bloomberg at the time.

That designation surprised officials in Singapore. The city-state maintains far stricter testing and social distancing measures than in the US, and its Ministry of Health posts detailed virus statistics, in English, online every day.

In response, Singapore said it would share its Covid statistics with the CDC and the local US embassy. "Just to be clear, we know our situation very well," Health Minister Ong Ye Kung told reporters on Jan 5.

Ong, co-chair of the multi-ministry taskforce on Covid-19, added that "the US CDC is not aware of our surveillance test numbers", which show that the incidence of Covid-19 in our community is currently "low and stable".

"Every week, we administer over 150,000 PCR tests, and that works out to over 21,000 PCR tests per day. Positive rates for these tests are under 2 per cent."

BLOOMBERG