COVID-19 Updates from Singapore with Prof Paul Tambyah
Published: 13 Apr 2020
The first of the 12-part weekly webinar series, “COVID-19: Updates from Singapore” kicked off on 9 April 2020 with more than 1,300 tuning in worldwide.
Professor Dale Fisher, from NUS Medicine’s Department of Medicine and Chair of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), WHO, compared COVID-19 infection figures worldwide, taken a week apart. From an epidemiological perspective, Prof Dale Fisher provided insights of how each region was faring in the wake of the outbreak. He presented his analysis of how countries were flattening the curve in their own way, focusing on China, Taiwan and Vietnam.
The time was passed on to the webinar’s first guest, Prof Paul Tambyah. Professor in Medicine at NUS Medicine and Senior Consultant in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the National University Hospital, he shared details of the first case of COVID-19 in Singapore and addressed issues such as loss of the sense of smell as a sign of infection, whether airborne virus transmission was possible, and the likelihood of a new vaccine in the coming months. He also highlighted how good patient care takes top precedence in an outbreak. Prof Tambyah concluded with a quote from Dr Harvey Fineberg, President of the Institute of Medicine, who said that the goal was not to flatten the curve, but to “crush” it, and gave viewers a sober reminder that, “No one is truly safe, until everyone is truly safe.”
Prof Fisher closed the last segment of the session with a summary of his weekly meetings with GOARN. The wearing of masks, public spraying of disinfectants, isolation and quarantine were top of the agenda. Lastly, Prof Fisher used Vietnam’s current risk communication management of COVID-19 and its outbreak response principles as one success story which has worked so far.
WATCH: COVID-19 Updates from Singapore with Prof Paul Tambyah
Tune in to the second session of “COVID-19: Updates from Singapore” on 16 April 2020, which will feature guest speaker, Dr Wang Linfa, Professor and Director of the Programme in Emerging Infectious Diseases at Duke-NUS Medical School.
Learn more and register for the session, “COVID-19: From bats, pangolin to coronavirus and serology”here.
