Coronavirus: Singapore
100 soldiers to help national call centre deal with case surge
They will provide guidance, answer questions and reassure patients
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The Singapore Army will deploy about 100 soldiers to help deal with the surge of Omicron cases here.
The soldiers will beef up the national call centre to provide guidance, answer questions and reassure Covid-19 patients, said Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen in a Facebook post yesterday.
Singapore has been experiencing a surge in Covid-19 cases as the Omicron variant of the virus spreads in the community.
Yesterday was the seventh day in a row that the number of hospitalisations crossed the 1,000 mark, with 1,205 cases and 21 patients in the intensive care unit.
The country also reported 9,771 new locally transmitted Covid-19 infections, down from 10,542 the day before.
On Sunday, the Ministry of Health (MOH) said hospital emergency departments were seeing high numbers of patients, resulting in long queues and waiting times.
The Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) had been involved in contact tracing efforts earlier during the pandemic.
In April 2020, The Straits Times reported that more than 1,300 SAF and Ministry of Defence personnel were involved in contact tracing and calling.
In October last year, about 90 SAF regulars, 350 full-time national servicemen and 10 volunteers from the SAF Volunteer Corps were deployed to help the home recovery programme in various roles.
But in November, Dr Ng said that the SAF would be handing over the management of the Covid-19 home recovery programme to MOH, as the situation had stabilised.
In its daily update last night, MOH said 128 people required oxygen support, up from 115 on Thursday.
Of the new local cases yesterday, 2,092 were detected through polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests.
Another 7,679 cases were detected through antigen rapid tests (ARTs), which means the patients displayed no symptoms or their symptoms were mild.
There were 159 new imported cases, with 109 detected through PCR tests and 50 through ARTs.
Three people died of Covid-19, MOH said.
The weekly Covid-19 infection growth rate stood at 1.74, down from 2.26 the day before. The rate refers to the ratio of community cases for the past week, over the week before. A rate of more than one shows that the number of new weekly Covid-19 cases is increasing.
With the latest update yesterday, Singapore has recorded a total of 449,570 Covid-19 cases, with 885 deaths.
