Director of the Health Ministry, Kenneth Mak, confessed that the daily reported figures by the government is lower because the government does not have enough test kits. Suspect cases who exhibited symptoms are told to wait in isolation rooms before getting tested:
“We eventually will need to test all of them but the first priority is really to get them out, make sure they are properly isolated, given the high rate of infection within those dormitories… Workers with symptoms but are yet to be tested may mean that the actual number of Covid-19 patients in dormitories is in fact larger than the number of cases officially reported by the Ministry of Health.”
The Health Ministry director denied that the government is being dishonest, and blamed the insufficiency of testing kits:
“It’s not an issue of fudging or dodging or trying to hide numbers. It’s really a question of making sure that our priority in testing matches the needs on the ground and making sure that we report as transparently as we can.”
The Singapore government has earlier reported that they are able to produce a test result within 10 minutes, but this has turned out to be fake news.
Singapore reported another 528 new cases yesterday, bringing the total to 14,951, the highest in Asia outside China.