US to revise S'pore travel advisory after receiving updated Covid-19 data from MOH

Earlier in the week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had reclassified its travel advisory alert for Singapore to "unknown".

Lean Jinghui | January 07, 2022, 07:01 PM

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will be working with the Ministry of Health (MOH) regarding Singapore's Covid-19 testing data, according to an email statement sent to Bloomberg on Thursday, Jan. 6.

The U.S. agency added that it will also update its Travel Health Notice for Singapore accordingly.

What happened

Earlier in the week, the CDC had reclassified its travel advisory alert for Singapore to "unknown".

This placed Singapore on the same classification as countries including North Korea, Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan.

The advisory said, "Because the current situation in Singapore is unknown, even fully-vaccinated travellers may be at risk for getting and spreading Covid-19 variants."

According to Bloomberg, the U.S. agency had stated at that point in time that at issue was "a lack of testing findings".

That's because the agency had obtained the statistics from aggregator site Our World in Data.

The data on the website has not been updated since November 2021.

Singapore will share Covid-19 statistics

In response, health minister Ong Ye Kung shared during a press conference on Jan. 5 that MOH is currently engaging the U.S. embassy and will provide necessary Covid-19 data to the U.S. CDC.

"To be clear: we know our situation very well," he added.

Ong shared that the positive rates for over 150,000 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests administered every week is just under two per cent.

Additionally, only a "very small handful" of wastewater testing stations across the island are registering the presence of Covid-19 viral fragments.

"So we are sure that the incidence of Covid-19 in our community is currently low and stable," said Ong.

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