$10k fine for woman who leaked daily number of Covid-19 cases

On various occasions between March and April last year, a 36-year-old woman leaked the daily number of Covid-19 cases before the Ministry of Health (MOH) officially announced it.

Singaporean Tang Lin was fined $10,000 yesterday, after pleading guilty to five charges of wrongful communication under the Official Secrets Act (OSA).

Four of the charges involved leaking to her colleagues at a bank the daily number of Covid-19 cases, which she got from her acquaintance Zhao Zheng - another Singaporean who was working at MOH at the time. Court documents did not reveal details about Tang's job.

The remaining charge involved soliciting confidential information about a Covid-19 patient from Zhao, 36. Five other similar charges were taken into consideration during sentencing.

The court heard that Zhao was deputy lead of MOH's Data Management Unit, which had been set up in response to the pandemic. She had access to and handled information relating to the Covid-19 situation here, including the daily number of confirmed cases and details of each case.

Zhao began sharing the daily number of cases in a WeChat group, of which Tang was a member, as early as March 16 last year.

Tang initially shared information on the daily number of cases with other members of a WhatsApp group chat she was a part of, through private messages or face-to-face conversations. There were five others members in that group, all of whom were her colleagues.

But she later progressed to sending the daily number of cases to the group chat, despite knowing that the information was confidential and had not yet been released to the public by MOH.

The court heard that Tang did so to encourage her colleagues to be more careful and take more precautions, as the number of Covid-19 cases was increasing daily then.

According to court documents, she shared the information in the group chat on nine occasions between March and April last year.

On March 27 last year, Tang also approached Zhao over WeChat for information about a Covid-19 case who lived in her condominium.

The court heard that Tang was worried that her son, then aged two, might have inadvertently come into contact with the case, as she had taken him to the condo's common facilities. She assured Zhao that she would not disseminate any details shared with her.

The next day, Zhao performed a search on a spreadsheet on the MOH intranet, which contained details of all confirmed Covid-19 cases in Singapore. She told Tang that the case residing in her condominium was an imported one.

After Tang made further queries, Zhao divulged the dates on which the case had returned to Singapore and was admitted to the National Centre for Infectious Diseases.

The prosecution noted in its submissions that Tang's case is one of several leaks of information by public servants during the pandemic.

As a result of the leaks, the public service had to adjust its approach in dealing with the pandemic, it said. This included ring-fencing of certain processes, which slowed down information flow between agencies during investigations.

But it also noted the motivations behind Tang's actions were largely out of concern for those around her, such as her child.

MOH said in April that Zhao, who faces 24 charges under the OSA, had been suspended from her job. Her case is still pending.