COVID-19: Singapore confirms 876 new cases, total crosses 23,000
SINGAPORE — The Ministry of Health (MOH) has confirmed 876 new COVID-19 cases in Singapore as of Sunday (10 May) noon, bringing the total to 23,336.
Of the cases, 860 are foreign workers living in dormitories, said the ministry. There is one imported case and four cases in the local community.
There are also five new clusters: a construction site at 15 Serangoon North Avenue 1, a construction site at Tanah Merah Coast Road, 9 Woodlands Industrial Park E1, 11 Woodlands Industrial Park E1 and 515 Yishun Industrial Park A.
Also, the ministry said that it had recently found that 33 cases from a laboratory were false positives, “due to an apparatus calibration issue for one of its test kits”. This was discovered as a result of its regular reviews of laboratory tests.
Subsequent retesting at the National Public Health Laboratory confirmed that these were negative cases. “There were no false negative results discovered from our review,” MOH said. “MOH has taken immediate actions to rectify the situation. The laboratory has stopped all tests and is working to resolve the calibration issue.”
In addition, the ministry said, “There were two results that had been equivocal, and were subsequently verified to be negative upon re-testing.”
It added that all equivocal results are sent to the National Public Health Laboratory for re-testing. “As a precautionary measure, we had categorised Cases 18669 and 19360 as positive while pending verification, and isolated them.”
Links in clusters
Further epidemiological investigations and contact tracing have uncovered links between previously announced and new cases.
This includes the five additional cases that are now linked to the cluster at Mustafa Centre (145 Syed Alwi Road), which has a total of 129 confirmed cases currently
One additional case is linked to the cluster at Acacia Home (30 Admiralty Street), which has a total of 17 confirmed cases now.
More than 50 clusters linked to foreign worker dormitories have been identified thus far, including Singapore’s largest cluster linked to S11 Dormitory@Punggol, followed by Tuas View Dormitory and Sungei Tengah Lodge.
The three are among the 25 dorms that have been gazetted as isolation areas. Some 400,000 foreign workers live in dorms here in Singapore.
Over 2,700 patients discharged in total
A total of 425 more cases of COVID-19 infection have been discharged from hospitals or community isolation facilities. In all, 2,721 have fully recovered from the infection.
There are currently 1,097 confirmed cases who are still in hospital, with 22 of them in critical condition in the intensive care unit. A total of 19,498 are isolated and cared for at community facilities. These are those who have mild symptoms, or are clinically well but still test positive for COVID-19.
Apart from 20 who have passed away due to COVID-19 complications, six patients who tested positive for the virus have died from unrelated causes, including a 44-year-old Bangladeshi man who died of a heart attack on Tuesday.
As of 4 May, the ministry has conducted 175,604 swab tests, of which 123,525 were done on unique individuals.
This translates to about 30,800 swabs conducted per 1 million total population, and around 21,600 unique individuals swabbed per 1 million total population.
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