The Ministry of Health (MOH) has preliminarily confirmed 14 new cases of Covid-19 in Singapore as of 12pm on Friday, Dec. 25, 2020.

This brings the total number of cases to 58,509.

All 14 cases are imported.

All of the imported cases had already been placed on Stay-Home Notice upon arrival in Singapore.

There are no new cases of locally-transmitted Covid-19 infection and no new cases in the dormitories.

Further updates will be shared by MOH this evening.

B117 strain

On Dec. 23, MOH said that the National Public Health Laboratory is performing viral genomic sequencing for confirmed Covid-19 cases who had arrived from Europe recently. This is in light of the reports of the new potentially more contagious B117 strain circulating in the UK.

A total of 31 imported cases from Europe, who arrived in Singapore between November 17 and December 17, were confirmed to have Covid-19 infection in December 2020.

29 of them have been tested so far for the B117 strain, and one has been confirmed to carry it.

11 cases are "preliminary positive", and MOH is pending "confirmatory results".

Top photo by Joshua Lee.