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All 9 new COVID cases in Singapore asymptomatic, including 2-year-old S'porean girl

Local tour guide Kyanta Yap shows a traditional clothes iron in Kampong Lorong Buangkok, the last remaining village in Singapore October 3, 2020. Picture taken October 3, 2020.  REUTERS/Edgar Su
A tour guide shows a traditional clothes iron in Kampong Lorong Buangkok, the last remaining village in Singapore. (PHOTO: Reuters/Edgar Su)

SINGAPORE — The Ministry of Health (MOH) confirmed nine new COVID-19 cases in Singapore as of Thursday (8 October), taking the country’s total to 57,849.

All nine new cases are asymptomatic and were proactively detected, said the MOH.

Four cases reside in foreign worker dormitories, of which one had been identified earlier as a contact of previous cases, and had already been quarantined and tested. Three cases were detected through surveillance testing.

The remaining five cases are imported – including a two-year-old Singaporean girl – who had all been placed on the stay-home notice or isolated upon their arrival here.

The Singaporean girl had returned from Nepal on 25 September, while two imported cases are currently employed in Singapore: an engineer on a short-term work project here who arrived from France on 5 October, while another arrived from Japan on 6 October.

The remaining two imported cases are crew members of a ship that arrived here from Malaysia on 23 September. They did not disembark from the ship and were isolated after a contact, a previous case, had been confirmed to be infected.

“They were swabbed while quarantined on the ship, where they had remained until their test results came back positive for COVID-19 and were then conveyed by ambulance to a hospital,” said the MOH.

Overall, 22 per cent of new cases have no established links and epidemiological investigations are in progress.

“In the meantime, all the identified close contacts of the cases have been isolated and placed on quarantine, and will be tested at the start and end of their quarantine period so that we can detect asymptomatic cases. We will also conduct serological tests for the close contacts to determine if the cases could have been infected by them,” said the MOH.

The ministry noted the number of new cases in the community has remained stable at an average of one case per day in the past two weeks.

It added that the number of unlinked cases in the community has also remained stable at an average of fewer than one case per day in the past two weeks.

Of Singapore’s COVID-19 tally, some 94.2 per cent – or 54,479 – are cases living in foreign worker dorms.

99% of total cases have recovered, 1 in ICU

With 44 more patients discharged from hospitals or community isolation facilities on Thursday, 57,668 cases – or 99.7 per cent of the total – have fully recovered from the infection.

Most of the 35 hospitalised cases are stable or improving, while one is in critical condition in the intensive care unit.

A total of 119 patients with mild symptoms or are clinically well but still test positive are isolated and cared for at community facilities.

Apart from 27 patients who have died from COVID-19 complications, 15 others who tested positive for the virus were determined to have died from unrelated causes, including three whose deaths were attributed to a heart attack and another four, whose deaths were attributed to coronary heart disease.

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