Singapore reports 793 new COVID-19 cases, mostly foreign workers

Singapore on Friday reported 793 new coronavirus cases, mostly foreign workers living in dormitories, taking the total number of infections in the country to 26,891, the health ministry said.

Out of the 793 new cases, only one is a Singaporean citizen or a permanent resident (foreigner).

The rest are all foreign workers residing in dormitories, the ministry said.

As of Thursday, 5,964 people have recovered from the disease since the first case was reported here on January 23. The deadly virus has claimed 21 lives so far.

Meanwhile, leading infectious diseases specialist Leo Yee Sin on Thursday warned that the coronavirus might be "with us for a long time".

However, the infection can be contained if Singapore follows the virus' "dance steps", she assured.

Calling the ongoing "circuit breaker" a "hammer" to curb the spread of the virus, Leo said, while strict safe distancing measures have flattened the infection curve in the community, such restrictions are "not sustainable", the Channel News Asia reported.

"Eventually, we need to come out of that lockdown situation," said Leo, who was speaking at a webinar organised by the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and National University Health System.

However, it's unlikely that the virus will be eliminated, so the next step would be to minimise its impact, she was quoted as saying by the report.

"What is left is for us to now develop a system to be able to contain the virus in a way that we basically follow the dance step of the virus," said Leo, who is the executive director of the National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID).

She said that the most likely scenario would be "waves of the epidemic interspersed with periods of low-level transmissions".

Singapore needs to have the ability and healthcare capacity to cope with intermittent surges of infections, Leo said.

"It is extremely important that we need to be able to sustain that (public health) capacity and capability; continue to have active case finding (and be) able to contact trace, isolate, quarantine and have a rapid response team to be able to respond to any of the potential epidemic waves in the future," she said.