Dear Reader,
It has been nine months since Sars-CoV-2 appeared amidst an unsuspecting and unprepared world. In these nine months, the coronavirus has sickened close to 40 million people and taken more than 1 million lives.* It has sent the world’s economies into recession, separated families, upended everyone’s lives, exacerbated geopolitical tensions, and spawned a new global race to produce and procure the much-needed vaccine that will help to bring the pandemic to an end.
The virus has also forced everyone to reexamine their assumptions. Singapore has taken drastic and bold steps to mitigate the effects of COVID-19, though the country still grapples with a record unemployment rate of 4.5%, and economic growth has gone into negative territory. We have painfully come around to the realisation that we are unlikely to return to our way of life as it was before 4 February 2020, the date when the first COVID-19 case involving community transmission was detected in Singapore. This understanding has led us to reorganise the way we work and play and, in many instances, to reconstruct and rebuild our lives.
I think of our founding generations’ exemplary flinty acceptance of the reality of their times and believe we too can and are rising to the challenge of our time. Here at the School, we are drawing upon our own reserves of resilience to get on with it. From organising and teaching classes that comprise students in lecture theatres as well as others who are Zooming in from their homes and hostels, to putting in place protocols that protect students and staff in clinical, laboratory and office settings, we are adapting and ensuring that our mission of educating and training the next generation of healthcare professionals continues apace. The COVID-19 pandemic holds many lessons for practically everyone and we are also identifying opportunities to improve, as well as tend to hitherto unrecognised needs and gaps in what we do and how we go about our work.
It is in our common DNA to come together to overcome adversity. In our 115th year, in ways big and small, from biomedical research to medical education and public information, the NUS medical school has joined hands with partners here and around the world in the search for solutions to this global viral crisis. Take the work that Associate Professor Sylvie Alonso of the School’s Immunology and Microbiology group is doing with colleagues at Monash University: they are adapting new cancer and pan-influenza vaccine technology to develop a COVID-19 vaccine for the elderly. Their proof of concept studies have triggered long term immunity in animal models. Crucially, once preclinical validation has been completed, this promising vaccine candidate could enter clinical trials rapidly as manufacturing capabilities are readily available in both Singapore and Australia. COVID-19 may have imposed social and physical distancing upon us all, but it will not be able to sunder the ties that bind. As WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “The pandemic has reminded us of a simple truth—that for all our differences, we are one human race and we are stronger together. For everything COVID-19 has taken from us, it has also given us something—a reminder of what really matters and the opportunity to forge a common future.”
We are meeting the challenge of our time and we will prevail.
Yours sincerely,
Chong Yap Seng
* Correct as of 19 October 2020