The migrant worker dormitories shouldn’t be hindsight, Tan Chuan-Jin hinted
But in any case, Mr Tan seems to be hinting that it shouldn’t be hindsight that an outbreak has happened within the migrant worker dormitories as it is common sense that given people living together in close quarters would cause mass transmission of the virus.
This is contrary to the statements made by the Minister for National Development, Lawrence Wong, and the Minister for Manpower, Josephine Teo, who brought up excuses like
hindsight and rewinding the clock when explaining the explosion of cases among migrant workers.
Mr Wong in a press conference on 9 April said that if he had known about how cases in migrant worker dormitories would later “explode” into big clusters, he would have done things differently.
He remarked, “Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of the benefit of hindsight.”
Ms Teo, on the other hand, quoted in an interview with the BBC on 22 April, “If we were to be able to rewind the clock, one could say that these safe distancing measures needed to go much further.”