As Singapore wins global plaudits for its handling of the coronavirus, the disease has spread rapidly within its large migrant worker community, highlighting what rights groups say is a weak link in the city state’s containment efforts.
Singapore has managed to mitigate the spread of the disease among its citizens by rigorous contact tracing and surveillance, earning praise from the World Health Organization. Infections within the migrant community, however, are mounting.
Singapore's health ministry on Sunday confirmed 657 new coronavirus infections, taking the city-state's total to 18,205.
85% of the cases are among migrant workers living in dormitories, the ministry said.
To address the serious situation in the dormitories, many healthcare workers have given their time and energy to provide on-the-ground support to those living there.
Zubair Amin is one of around 800 medical staff from the National University Health System (NUHS) who volunteered to be deployed in Singapore’s dormitories to provide on-site medical support.
Bangladeshi born Zubair is a graduate of Dhaka Medical College. He completed his residency and fellowship in Paediatrics from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has a Masters in Health Profession Education from the same university.
Currently, he is the Assistant Dean, Curriculum and Assessment in School of Medicine, National University of Singapore and Consultant Neonatologist at National University Hospital.
Zubair has been volunteering at the dormitories' medical posts for seven hours each day over the past three weekends so far, from 8am to 3pm.
He has mostly been at Sungei Tengah Lodge, Singapore's largest purpose-built dormitory that has a capacity of 25,000 workers, but also spent some time at Tuas View Dormitory.
Sungei Tengah Lodge is one of the first few dormitories gazetted as an isolation area by the authorities, and as of April 30, had 930 Covid-19 cases linked to the cluster there — making it the second-largest cluster of confirmed cases here after S11 Dormitory in Punggol.
And the sheer scale of the situation on the ground certainly did not escape Zubair's notice when he arrived there for duty on his first weekend shift:
"So when we reach there, this whole setup and the lack of familiarity and the enormity of this whole thing that I'm in looking at — you know, these big clusters and their 25,000 dorm residents, and many, many of them are actually patients — I mean, this scale was mind-boggling.”
At the dormitory, Zubair joins a team at the medical post, which is staffed by doctors, nurses, paramedics, pharmacists, and other operations personnel.
The number of doctors on the team on any given day varies, he says — "some days it might be four; some days we have six."
There are also teams of doctors who do rounds to the sick bays of the dormitories.
At the medical post, Zubair estimates they see around 150 patients each day, which he describes as "very intense."
"The psychological barrier is there, because you are dealing with an enormous number of patients," he tells us.
Despite the still-high numbers of new infections and new dormitory clusters being reported every day, Zubair says he still feels positive about Singapore's ability to overcome the crisis.
"I think I feel optimistic. I think, you know, as I said, that this is a learning process for all of us. I mean, we need to learn, we need to adapt.”