88% of eligible migrant workers have had Covid-19 booster shots

The take-up of the Covid-19 booster shot has been high among migrant workers here, with 88 per cent of those eligible choosing to get the additional dose.

This includes workers living in dormitories, as well as construction, marine and process workers living in other types of accom-modation.

Workers are eligible for the additional dose 150 days after their second jab, and the booster exercise for them kicked off in October at the Kranji vaccination centre.

But even with the high booster take-up rate and the already high vaccination rate among dorm residents, more time is needed to understand the new Omicron variant before restrictions can be eased further, Manpower Minister Tan See Leng said late last week.

"We are monitoring the situation very closely," he said in an interview ahead of International Migrants Day yesterday.

Dr Tan noted that preliminary data out of South Africa, where the Omicron variant was first identified, seems to show that those who are vaccinated have only a very mild form of the illness when infected with the new strain.

"We hope that as more studies come out, and that indeed (Omicron cases) are actually asymptomatic or very mild, we don't have to impose tight restrictions," he said.

More workers have been allowed to leave their dorms to visit public places since Dec 3. However, while 3,000 a day can do so - up from 3,000 a week - the utilisation of these community visits is not yet close to full, Dr Tan added.

"Let's utilise what we have opened up," he said, while acknowledging that organising these community visits still requires a fair amount of logistics.

Requests to go out on these visits were also significantly higher on the weekends than on weekdays, as employers have had trouble staggering rest days, Dr Tan said.

Some workers, at the request of their contractor employers, also forgo their rest days to work overtime on projects to meet deadlines.

Many workers agree to this so that they can earn more money to send home, employers and dorm operators told The Sunday Times.

Dorm operators confirmed that relatively few residents have taken the chance to go out, possibly because they are worried about catching Covid-19, or their employers have those same concerns.

Westlite Accommodation, which manages nine dormitories with more than 28,000 residents, told ST that only 300 joined the community visits last month.

Dr Tan said the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) had been planning to ease restrictions from as early as December last year, but a new stumbling block arose each time.

"When we planned for it in May, the huge outbreak of Delta came about. Then we tried to plan it for August, (but) we had multiple outbreaks."

Dr Tan added: "From the time I had the availability of these vaccines for migrant workers, which was actually also quite early on, our main focus was to ease them into the community.

"We wanted to know, what if (migrant workers) catch the Delta variant? Would the vaccinations then protect them? Everything that we do has to be based on knowledge or data, statistics and facts."

Dr Tan said MOM hopes to use the same approach for Omicron as it did for the Delta variant.

"We will certainly be very measured, given what we have learnt and what we have understood thus far," he said.

The ministry has been encouraging employers to think out of the box to find ways to stagger workers' rest days so that more of them can go out for leisure, he added.

"It is not that we have not contemplated more easing. But if we allow all 300,000 workers to all come out on the same day on a Sunday and everyone just adopts a carnival-type atmosphere... It means that we have never learnt from this pandemic."