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SINGAPORE – Nearly half of migrant workers living in dormitories have had a Covid-19 infection, authorities said on Monday (December 14).
As of Sunday, 54,505 of these workers tested positive for the virus using a polymerase chain reaction or PCR test.
Another 98,289 had a positive result of a serological test, which looks for a previous infection.
This means that 152,794 dormitory workers have tested positive for PCR, serology, or both.
They make up 47 percent of Singapore’s 323,000 dormitory dwellers, the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) and the Ministry of Health (MOH) said in a joint statement.
The ministries added that serological tests are still being carried out on some 65,000 workers in dormitories who had not done them before. “This will give us a complete picture of the prevalence of infection among our migrant workers,” they said.
PCR tests are used to diagnose current or new infections. Serology tests identify those who have been infected in the past by detecting the presence of Covid-19 antibodies in blood samples.
At a press conference of the multi-ministerial working group on Covid-19 on Monday, Second Minister of Manpower Tan See Leng said that the government’s medical and testing strategy had helped achieve good health outcomes for workers. migrants, with very low morbidity and mortality rates among them.
“It has also allowed us to better understand the prevalence of infection among our migrant workers,” he added.
“This will go a long way, in the coming months, to inform us and allow us to refine our strategies to keep them safe from future outbreaks.”
Dr Tan said Singapore had made significant progress since March, when the first Covid-19 infections were detected in bedrooms.
At the beginning of the outbreak, the top priority was containing the spread of the virus, as well as taking care of the health of those affected, he said.
Once this was accomplished in early June, the focus shifted to cleaning workers and dormitories so that recovered and infection-free workers could safely resume work.
At the end of May, the scientific literature had highlighted that a significant number of those infected did not present symptoms, but still contributed to the spread of Covid-19.
Local and international data also showed that infected people could continue to shed non-infectious viral fragments for several months even after recovery.
Therefore, an even more comprehensive testing strategy was needed to separate workers who had never been infected, or had the virus before but were no longer infectious, from those who are currently infected or harboring the virus without any symptoms, said.
“That is why we made the decision to systematically screen all migrant workers living in dormitories to allow workers to return to work quickly and safely,” he said, adding that a combination of PCR and serology tests was used.
In August, all migrant workers living in dormitories had been screened at least once for Covid-19. “This gave us the assurance that the vast majority of infections have been contained,” Dr. Tan said.
October 13 was another important milestone, as no new cases were detected in the bedrooms for the first time since March 25. He noted that new infections in bedrooms have remained low in the past two months.
By early November, more than 98% of this population had received authorization to resume work.
Dr. Tan said that progress has been made possible with the help of stakeholders such as dormitory operators, employers and non-governmental organizations.
He also recognized the almost 3,000 officers and volunteers who formed an inter-agency working group to help curb the virus situation in the bedrooms, as well as the cooperation of the workers themselves.
“We could not have contained this virus without the determination, cooperation, patience and understanding of migrant workers in the dormitories,” he said.
But with all the efforts in recent months, Singapore “has just reached base camp” and the crisis is far from over.
“We still have to climb the peak of the mountain to ensure that as we safely open, we will continue to implement a robust and inclusive regimen of vaccination and regular testing for all of our migrant workers, isolating and treating those affected.” and doing aggressive contact tracing while keeping the rest of us safe, “he added.
The MOM and the Health Ministry said that the vast majority of migrant dormitory workers who tested positive for PCR or serology were asymptomatic or had very mild symptoms, according to a study of specially designed dormitory workers who tested positive on 25 of July.
Only about one in five migrant workers living in those dormitories had symptoms, and the rest had very little or no symptoms.
The ratio between those that are positive for PCR and those that are positive for serology is 1: 1.8.
This means that for every Covid-19 infection in the bedrooms detected by the PCR test, 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 in the process,” the ministries said.
The 1: 1.8 ratio is comparable to the same ratio for all of South Korea, and lower than 1: 4 in Spain and 1:15 in France, they said.
“Our low index reflects the extensive tests that were carried out in the dormitories,” added the ministries.
When it comes to reporting on Covid-19 practices, the ministries said Singapore follows the World Health Organization’s criteria that only positive results from PCR tests are included in the case count, ensuring consistency in the reporting of cases in all countries.
But a different approach is taken for serological tests, which are used to aid epidemiological investigations and to assess the overall prevalence of infection in a population.
Most countries only perform sample serological tests, to estimate the prevalence of infections in a population, but Singapore went further by performing serological tests on the entire population of migrant workers living in dormitories, the ministries said.
“This was a unique aspect of our efforts to clean up the Covid-19 bedrooms,” they added.
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