Singapore has had to change course along its journey in tackling Covid-19 and is trying to persuade its people that it is necessary to accept a few thousand virus cases a day, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said yesterday.
While it will try its best, there will be casualties, mainly old people who will not make it. “It is just the way life is, and it is the way influenza and pneumonia and other diseases carry off old folk by the thousands every year. We accept that, and we have to manage this going forward without letting it go out of control,” he added.
PM Lee was speaking to Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait at a gala dinner at The Ritz-Carlton, Millenia Singapore on day one of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum.
PM Lee noted that Singapore was trying to reach an endpoint without paying the high price many other societies have when populations in these places were infected before they got vaccinated.
This is also why Singapore is easing up on restrictions “step by step”, even as it moves to living with the virus, “without having had to make unsettling U-turns”.
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