Healthcare related news in Singapore
Another push to get those eligible but yet to be vaccinated, to vaccinate. If you still refuse to be vaccinated, you will soon have to foot your medical bill if you are unfortunately infected with the coronavirus. The median bill is around $25,000 including ICU care. With subsidies and Medishield Life coverage, the amount will come down to around $2000 - $4000.
The actual amount will vary from patient to patient as it depends on the severity of the disease and the treatment rendered.
The decision to tighten restrictions temporarily was a very difficult one to make and one that the government did not make lightly.
With the temporary restrictions, the government will be focused on 2 priorities: to stabilise healthcare protocols including the new protocol for people to recover at home, and to augment our healthcare capacity by bringing in more medical centres to deal with the much larger volume of daily cases of as high as 5000.
Augmenting our hospital capacity is not just a matter of increasing the number of medical centres and facilities, it's also about medical personnel. The SAF has been roped in to help.
The MOH will be setting up new community care facilities to provide clinical care to COVID-19 patients who are generally clinically well but have underlying conditions that require a closer monitoring of their disease course. These are those who are stable and have mild symptoms.
This will help to augment our hospital capacity so that only those who actually need close and specialised medical attention (such as oxygen supplementation and intensive care) will receive their medical care in hospitals.
Home recovery will be the default care management protocol for fully vaccinated infected individuals because they are mostly asymptomatic or showing mild symptoms. Their isolation period will also be shortened as they recover faster. They can be discharged as early as 7 days into their illness if they show undetectable or low viral load which shows that they are non-infectious.
Singapore will find our own way forward based on our own circumstances. Our over-riding objective remains the same: to get to the end of the pandemic with little death and damage.
Vascular dementia is like a life sentence, a silent robber, robbing you of you abilities and memories but you are not helpless against it. You can take control of your life and lower your risk of developing it.
Sotrovimab is an investigational single-dose monoclonal antibody used for the treatment of patients with COVID-19 who do not require oxygen supplementation and who are at risk of progressing to severe COVID-19.
In vitro data indicate that sotrovimab maintains activity against all known variants of concern, including the Alpha (B.1.1.7), Beta (B.1.351), Gamma (P.1), and Delta (B.1.617.2) variants.
The WHO emergency list focuses on the needs of poorer countries with limited access to Covid-19 vaccines. Its objective is to make vaccines available as rapidly as possible to address the pandemic. It is a risk-based process that expedites the assessment of vaccines for use especially in these countries, where the benefits are deemed to outweigh the risks. Singapore's HSA has a more rigorous standard of assessment.
Allowing the Sinovac vaccine through the private healthcare sector gives people another option without compromising on Singapore's standards.
More than one drug to treat COVID-19 has been approved for Phase 2 trials by the Israeli Health Ministry, a development that brings hope.
Tan Tock Seng Hospital will resumes admissions safely after successfully containing the cluster that first emerged on April 27. The hospital has completed six rounds of testing for all inpatients and two rounds for all 12,000 staff on campus. The swabbing results for all sweeps have consistently returned negative,
