Earlier this month, Multi-Ministry Task Force co-chair Gan Kim Yong warned that our daily Covid-19 cases may hit 5,000 by mid-October.
Though our prolonged doubling cycle has seemingly ‘postponed’ this situation, the prediction still held true.
On Wednesday (27 Oct), Singapore reported 5,324 new cases, including 4,651 in the community.
This was apparently due to a wave of test results that arrived rapidly within just a few hours.
In an update on Wednesday (27 Oct) night, the Ministry of Health (MOH) reported 5,324 new cases of Covid-19 in Singapore, comprising:
Needless to say, this is the highest number of Covid-19 cases Singapore has seen in a single day. Prior to this, Singapore’s highest daily case tally was 3,994 on 19 Oct.
Explaining the sharp rise in cases, MOH said that testing laboratories had detected many Covid-positive cases within a few hours in the afternoon.
The health ministry is investigating this “unusual surge” and will closely monitor the trends over the next few days.
Despite the meteoric rise in daily case count, our weekly infection growth rate remains rather stable at 1.15.
This, however, means that our Covid-19 cases are still increasing on a weekly basis.
In the same report, MOH announced the passing of 10 patients due to Covid-19 complications.
Aged between 54 and 96 years, all but 1 of the casualties had underlying medical conditions.
The remaining healthy individual was unvaccinated.
In total, 349 individuals have passed away from Covid-19 in Singapore.
As of Wednesday (27 Oct), 79.8% of our ICU beds are occupied.
Of these, 142 are occupied by Covid-19 cases, including 76 unstable patients who require close monitoring and 66 who are critically ill and intubated. The remaining 143 beds are occupied by non-Covid patients.
There are currently 72 vacant ICU beds.
Meanwhile, MOH is closely monitoring 7 active clusters.
This includes the cluster at the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) which was added to the list earlier this week.
9 new cases were linked to the cluster, which currently has a total of 153 cases.
4 of the other clusters involve care or nursing homes:
The remaining 2 clusters are at pre-schools in Choa Chu Kang and Loyang:
It’s extremely worrying to have such a sharp rise in cases in a single day.
While MOH investigates the abnormal surge, we hope it’s a one-off event and that our case numbers will stabilise over the coming days.
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Featured image adapted from Xingjian Loy on Flickr.
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