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SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Nearly half of Singapore’s migrant workers living in dormitories have had COVID-19, according to the government, indicating that the virus has spread much more among those living in dormitories than the count shows. case officer.
Singapore has reported more than 58,000 cases of COVID-19 since the pandemic began, with the vast majority occurring in the cramped dormitories that mainly house low-wage South Asian workers.
But the government said Tuesday that while a total of 54,505 workers had tested positive for the virus using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests as of Sunday, an additional 98,289 had tested positive using serological tests. PCR tests diagnose current or new infections and serological tests indicate a past infection.
The COVID-19 prevalence rate in bedrooms is currently 47%, including the results of serological tests, the Ministry of Human Resources said in a statement. Singapore only includes positive confirmatory PCR test results in its case count as determined by the World Health Organization.
Outside of bedrooms, the prevalence rate of the virus in Singapore was around 0.25%, according to a serology sampling study of 1,600 people, according to a Ministry of Health official.
For every COVID-19 infection in bedrooms detected by PCR testing, another 1.8 cases were neither tested nor detected at that time, and were subsequently identified only by serological tests.
“This is not surprising, as many migrant workers did not have any symptoms and therefore would not have sought treatment or had a PCR test done in the process,” the ministry said.
Authorities are still completing serological tests on some 65,000 workers living in dormitories who have not done them before.
While most countries only perform sample serological tests to estimate the prevalence of infections in a population, Singapore is testing all migrant workers living in dormitories.
Singapore has reported only a handful of local COVID-19 cases in the past two months. It had the lowest death rate in the world from the virus with 29 deaths.
Singapore on Monday became the first Asian country to approve Pfizer-BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine and said it hopes to start receiving injections by the end of the year.
(Report by Aradhana Aravindan and additional report by Chen Lin in Singapore; Editing by Ana Nicolaci da Costa)
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