Disclaimer: Opinions expressed herewith are strictly mine as a private citizen and has nothing to do with my employer, the National University of Singapore.
I hope everyone is doing well. This past Semester has been quite a harrowing one and being cooping up at home for so long making me really edgy.
I am writing this note because I found one of my students sharing this note by one Dr Tan Meng Wah, with the comment “Good read.” I read, and I was horrified that my student thought it was a good read.
I think it’s drivel and I am well-aware of the Streisand Effect, but still I would encourage everyone to read it, before reading what I have to say. Always good to read two sides of the story and then decide. Don’t just listen to one side.
This note will be TL;DR, but given the complexities of what we will be discussing, cannot be helped.
Pre-Amble (Can Skip)
And given the complex environment that is the Internet today, allow me to start with the following pre-amble to provide some context and some disclaimers.
This note is written mainly for my students because I think it is important for them to learn how to make sense of life and what happens, from first gathers “facts” and then analyzing the situation from first principles. It should be clear why I think that this COVID19 crisis presents us with a good teaching moment.
This is a very unpleasant note to write, because I will effectively be defending the Government. That’s something that’s almost as cool as having to wipe my 5-year-old’s behind every couple of hours after he poops because of CB (never had to do this before. :’(). Ordinarily, I wouldn’t bother to defend the Government, because I am not paid enough to do that. But these are not ordinary times. We don’t have enough reasonable voices saying reasonable things. We need more sense making during this time of confusion and anxiety. For this reason, I thought I better step up and say something. Earlier, I was also too swamped with work and e-exams.
Declaration of potential conflict of interest: I am currently tangentially involved in the nation’s COVID19 efforts. SAF has been activated. SAF approached me because I have certain specialized skills and I am now effectively the commander of a small group of literally “keyboard warriors” supporting SAF, to support MOH in our (manual) contact tracing processes. The reason why I am declaring this is not because I want to pretend to be some kind of hero.
We are not. My students and I are playing a v v small and insignificant part. All credit goes to the real frontliners who are wearing PPE fighting the virus daily. I am declaring this because if I don’t, and some kaypoh learns about this later, I will get accused of being some kind of PAP mole sent by the COVID Taskforce to do PR. Such is the perilous nature of the internet this days. Do good also scared people find out. Allow me to make clear that my team and I are the grunts. We don’t get anywhere close to dunno what Ministerial Task Force. I want to clarify that I have had no access whatsoever to any kind of privileged information and everything that I will be talking about in this post comes from information that is publicly available online.
Let’s Role-Play MTF
Dr Tan wrote a lot of the usual opposition drivel about how the Government is bad and the PAP is incompetent. I am not going to be bothered to address those. I am not sure that there’s anything new there and the Government can jolly well deal with it when they are done fighting COVID. Not my problem. I will keep my analysis to COVID19 related issues.
To better understand the crisis and how to deal with the crisis, let’s pretend for a moment that we’re the Ministerial Task Force (MTF) for COVID19.
It is now Jan 2020. Wuhan is burning and it is in lockdown. We know that this is going to be a problem. We don’t know what we are dealing with exactly. We kiasi, quickly ban Wuhan, then we ban China and we form this dunno what MTF.
We don’t know what’s happening yet because the Chinese are too busy keeping their people from dying and studies have not been done. What do we assume? At this point, there are 2 choices: (i) we assume it’s going to kill us like SARS; and (ii) we can go with POTUS that this is just a “Chinese flu”.
We’re Singaporeans. Don’t be ridiculous. Of course we kiasi and assume SARS. We open the drawer and take out SARS SOP and execute.
Singapore’s ability to execute SOP is breath-taking. Clearly, if COVID19 were SARS, COVID19 would have been wiped out many times over.
To be fair, our initial execution was flawless. We were proclaimed the world’s Gold standard. So far, so good.
To Mask or Not to Mask, That is the Question
This is where a lot of self-proclaimed geniuses will tell you that the Government had failed when it told the population that they didn’t have to wear masks and then had to U-turn. 4 doctors had come out to say that they advocated the wearing of masks in Feb 2020. Why didn’t the Government listen?
This is where I will take a short break to scold the Government for saying that no need to wear masks because “masks not required.” Siao. You tell my grandma that it’s not effective my grandma also won’t believe you. How can be not effective? If not effective, the medical personnel wear masks for what? To look good ah?
Hold that thought.
At the same time, there are also complaints that supply of masks running out. People complain cannot buy masks.
People don’t know this *that* time, but we later know because of Madam Ho, what happened at the same time was that while ST had a N95 factory line and were ready to ship masks back to Singapore, Taiwan had banned us from exporting the masks back to Singapore? Do we announce this to the public so that we can all be pissed at Taiwan together? No cannot. Must diam diam. We announce this, we will create panic*.
* For now, all don’t panic and worry about masks -- confirm got enough: https://www.thinkchina.sg/china-will-have-too-many-mask-making-factories. Quality might be a problem but the supply is there.
Let’s come back to this question: should we make it compulsory to wear masks? This question needs to be answered at 2 levels
(i) Suppose we did make it compulsory to wear masks, and remember, this was pre-CB, so everyone is out as per normal. That means we will burn ~5 million masks a day. Dr Tan talks so much. Where is he and all the others who talk a lot going to cough up the masks? Talk is cheap hor. Keep in mind that our “supposed” friends are screwing us over and we don’t dare to announce publicly. If people want to know why we didn’t stockpile 5 million x 365 days worth of masks, don’t have to put up PQ, I tell you. SARS SOP didn’t need that. So yes, the PAP Government was not omniscient enough to know we will have COVID19 this year. Damn lousy lah. People should vote Dr Tan in next GE. He is clearly omniscient. Did anyone calculate how much 5 million x 365 days worth of masks would have cost us if COVID19 didn’t happen?
(ii) For the second level, did we *really* think we need to make everyone wear masks? It might be surprising that this is even a question, but it is -- and this is what separates the people who actually learnt something about probability in school and those who only know how to answer exam questions.
This is Jan-Feb 2020. Singapore has activated the world’s most efficient contact tracing system. Even single infected one we catch, we send to NCID. All their friends kenna quarantined. It seemed to work. That’s why we’re the gold standard. What does that mean? That means that even though we know there are likely some infected people that we haven’t yet identified and caught, we don’t expect them to be many. Conservatively, let’s say 100. With hindsight, that’s maybe too small, but at *that* point, that’s as good as it gets.
What is 100? Roughly, that’s probably the number of MediaCorp actors and actresses we have? I suspect MediaCorp has more. How often do you get to meet Zoe Tay or Fann Wong? I have never seen them in person in my life.
Note that you can only catch COVID from someone who has been infected. If there are only 100 of them running around, your probability of getting hemorrhoids is likely higher.
Let’s use an army analogy to make the situation more obvious. The masks are like bullets. If you are not likely to meet the enemy, you shoot the bullets for what? Conserve bullets when when they are needed and only the people likely to meet the enemy, i.e. firstline healthcare workers, should wear masks loh.
In other words, not wearing masks was the correct and most logical choice at that point. What other choice do people think we have? All wear masks, masks come from where? Dr Tan refers to this situation as a political consideration. Not enough masks is not enough masks simi sai political situation? Dr Tan and his 4 doctors can supply ah?
Basically, on the mask wearing issue, the Government did get the answer right (it was judged both impractical and of not urgent need), but got the working wrong, so kenna marked wrong.
Dr Tan mentioned that “To solve the shortage problem, the Government approached 400 suppliers in about 20 countries to buy more masks. At the same time, volunteers and female inmates from the Correctional Services were mobilized to help boost production of masks to 90,000 a day or 2.5 million masks a month.”
Implication is what? Singapore Government sleeping on the job and never go and try to buy masks? Well, what’s that ugly that looks like a bra, but not quite, in our house now? Dr Tan provide one or Hong Kong government procure for us he thinks?
But the story does not end there.....
On Testing and COVID numbers
But, before we go to the second part of this COVID saga, let’s take a brief intermission and talk about COVID numbers. I think that it’s v important for our students to learn about how to look at numbers and make sense of numbers. We have a Quantitative Reasoning (QR) module at NUS. I hope the instructors covered this example in class already.
First, the numbers are all wrong. It was obvious that the numbers coming out of China were all wrong. China was accused of under-reporting and lying about the seriousness of the situation. In fact, the chart coming out of China was surprisingly linear. Confirm fake lah!
Let me tell you this. If we look at the numbers coming out of the US, I can tell you almost certainty that the numbers are also under-reported. Confirm wrong. US also under-reporting and lying about their numbers?
So, what’s the moral of the story? Everybody lies?
As it turns out, there one big choke point that few people have talked about -- that’s testing. This COVID test is not some pregnancy test. You don’t happily go out to Watsons and buy one. Good for Korea for nailing this and really ramping up the tests. But most countries struggle, including us.
There are limits to how many tests can be conducted and processed. In fact, when we say that linear looking thing coming out of China, we were likely seeing the testing capacity rather than the actual number of cases.
So how do we make sense out of this lack of data? We look at the death rates. We take the country with the lowest death rate. I suspect it’s Singapore, but people can check. We’re at 0.06%. Basically out of every 10,000 infected, 6 die.
Let’s look at the US. They claim to have 1.65 million cases. They currently have a death rate 6%. That’s a hundred times higher than Singapore(!).
While we might believe that we have a better healthcare system in Singapore. Do we believe that we are 100x better? Not possible, so what we can do is to conservatively assume that their healthcare systems are overwhelmed and 2 to 3 times worse, so it might be reasonable to assume that their actual effective death rate should be say 0.2%.
What this suggests is that the situation in the US could potentially be 30x worse that what is officially reported. With the same approach, I had estimated the total number of cases in Wuhan was likely in the 300,000 range, when it was reported to be ~60,000.
The reader is encouraged to apply this simple methodology to get a sense of how bad things are in other countries. Generally, it’s probably *much* worse than what’s reported.
How and Why did Sh*t Hit the Fan?
It was all fine and dandy. We were all having our bubble tea, as the world went into chaos. Then what happened?
The methodology I used above is not rocket science. It would also be obvious to the MTF that things were rapidly going south overseas. What did we do?
We activated MFA and started evacuating our people from overseas. All our students on exchanged were recalled. Many were complaining.
As it turned out, many of these returnees were infected and we were not able to control the second wave, leading to the Circuit Breaker.
Was it a mistake to evacuate them?
I am glad that nobody suggested that we made a mistake in recalling our citizens. My view: We had no choice. We need to take care of our own.
The bigger problem was obviously are the foreign worker dorms. I am surprised that Dr Tan did not say anything about this and we went on and on this usual meaningless tirade against the Government that nobody probably cares to read. Nevermind, I do the job for him.
Let’s talk about the foreign worker dorms.
We have always had these NGOs, activists, dunno what, clamoring about improving conditions in the dorms, whatever lah. Generally, my impression was that we just have bunch of bleeding hearts trying to do. Good for them. Good for us. I mind my own business.
However, we now have this on-going narrative, that Government was completely at fault. If only the Government had listened to them and improved the conditions for the dorms, we wouldn’t have these massive numbers of infections in the dorms.
How many people believe this? Hands up.
Very good. Put your hand down.
Boys and girls, let talk about how to reason about this claim.
Suppose the Government has just listened to these NGOs. Every single one of these foreigner workers had their own single rooms with attached bathroom and sauna. Best in Singapore and Batam also. We throw in a cleaning auntie to do area cleaning for them and do their laundry. Just imagine that.
Do we believe that it would have allowed us to avoid the current problem with the foreign worker dorms?
Obviously, this would increase social distancing and *maybe* help somewhat. But guess what? The workers will still be eating together and working together. Do people understand how infectious this virus is? Even healthcare workers in full PPE can still catch it. Confirm will still kenna. Who are we kidding?
Keep in mind that we would not be requiring them to wear masks -- because our own people were not asked to wear masks then. You want to discriminate against these foreign workers?
My point: all these claims that acceding to the earlier demands of these NGOs and activists would have allowed us to avoid the current foreigner worker COVID situation is hogwash. Plain and simple.
Why are we misled into thinking that it would help? Because our brains are lazy. We want easy solutions. Part of it is also the Government’s fault. The Government didn’t offer us any reason for how and why the situation imploded in the dorm. Given the lack of an alternative, people just accept what is offered, hook, line and sinker.
I think it’s despicable for these groups to try to use this crisis to advance their lobbying. This is not the time. People also please don’t repeat stupid sh*t that you hear just because people say them. Use your brain to think about whether it makes sense.
There is a bunch of geniuses who say that if only we didn’t have any foreigner workers, there would not be any dorms and so there would be no foreign worker dorm problem. That statement is actually completely true. I shall leave it as an exercise for the reader to analyze the feasibility and helpfulness of that suggestion.
Root Cause of Foreign Dorm Infections
Keep in mind that we actually did have one foreign worker dorm incident even in the first wave. That was settled with military precision. People think about it. You might know that the foreign worker dorms are a risk, but if you get a case and it was handled quite easily, you would naturally think that the risk was manageable.
My hypothesis is that the real root cause for the foreign dorm infections was the humongous number of asymptomatic cases. To be fair, we always had this suspicion that there could be a small number of asymptomatic carriers. That the proportion could be up to 96(!)% was not apparent until after we had imposed the CB. By then, it was too late.
Why is it so hard for us and anyone to detect this earlier? Well, for the simple reason that there was a limited testing capacity.
If you had to choose who to test, would you choose the ones who look sick or the ones who look perfectly normal. This massive problem was likely detected when one dorm got hit and they did systematic testing in the dorms.
Maybe some people expect a Government that is more omniscient. They certainly have the option to vote in a more omniscient Government at the next GE. Our Tans seem to be pretty omniscient. :-)
Personally, I would be more circumspect and forgiving about the challenges of dealing with this enemy unseen.
Summary
Boys and girls, to conclude, I would like to summarize for you the key lessons that I would like you to remember:
(a) Data has context. It’s not simply a matter of how many infected cases a country reports. You need to understand where the data comes from and how it is obtained. The capacity limits for COVID testing means that we need to be wary about believing the data and it is not because anyone is intentionally under-reporting.
(b) Don’t just believe what people tell you. Just because people tell you that if the dorms were better everything would be ok, you don’t just believe them. You ask why should it be? Don’t just take a face value. Just because someone has a PhD, don’t just believe him. Heck, don’t even believe me. Derive everything again by yourself from first principles.
(c) Learn to use imagination and do thought experiments. Someone tells you, if you only listened to me and did this, everything will be good. Well, you just happily imagine that they were right and ask yourself, then what? The problem with this big mouths who talk a lot is that they just shoot off their mouths. They have no accountability to actually do anything. They have no sense of perspective, no sense of the costs and no sense of the practical constraints.
(d) Have a sense of perspective. We are not the only country to have massive numbers of foreign or migrant workers. I don’t believe that the living conditions of our foreigner workers are the worst in the world. Other countries have no COVID infections in their dorms or dorm-equivalents we think? Are people so naive? Note that as far as I know, we are the *only* country, where the PM has appeared on national TV to assure the foreign workers. To tell them, not worry, Singapore will take care of them. Think about that for a moment.
(e) School v Real Life. My complaint about school is that is often misleads our students into thinking that every problem has a model answer. Not true in life. There are situations where you know that sh*t is going to hit the fan and yet all you can do is to feel sorry for yourself while it happens in slomo. COVID19 is one such moment for Singapore. In times like this, we suck it up and wait to clean up after the mess is over.
On this note, all please be good. Stay home and stay safe! If you need to go out, observe safe distancing and wash your hands regularly.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/ben-leong/teaching-moments-from-fighting-covid19/10157484861167549/
I hope everyone is doing well. This past Semester has been quite a harrowing one and being cooping up at home for so long making me really edgy.
I am writing this note because I found one of my students sharing this note by one Dr Tan Meng Wah, with the comment “Good read.” I read, and I was horrified that my student thought it was a good read.
I think it’s drivel and I am well-aware of the Streisand Effect, but still I would encourage everyone to read it, before reading what I have to say. Always good to read two sides of the story and then decide. Don’t just listen to one side.
This note will be TL;DR, but given the complexities of what we will be discussing, cannot be helped.
Pre-Amble (Can Skip)
And given the complex environment that is the Internet today, allow me to start with the following pre-amble to provide some context and some disclaimers.
This note is written mainly for my students because I think it is important for them to learn how to make sense of life and what happens, from first gathers “facts” and then analyzing the situation from first principles. It should be clear why I think that this COVID19 crisis presents us with a good teaching moment.
This is a very unpleasant note to write, because I will effectively be defending the Government. That’s something that’s almost as cool as having to wipe my 5-year-old’s behind every couple of hours after he poops because of CB (never had to do this before. :’(). Ordinarily, I wouldn’t bother to defend the Government, because I am not paid enough to do that. But these are not ordinary times. We don’t have enough reasonable voices saying reasonable things. We need more sense making during this time of confusion and anxiety. For this reason, I thought I better step up and say something. Earlier, I was also too swamped with work and e-exams.
Declaration of potential conflict of interest: I am currently tangentially involved in the nation’s COVID19 efforts. SAF has been activated. SAF approached me because I have certain specialized skills and I am now effectively the commander of a small group of literally “keyboard warriors” supporting SAF, to support MOH in our (manual) contact tracing processes. The reason why I am declaring this is not because I want to pretend to be some kind of hero.
We are not. My students and I are playing a v v small and insignificant part. All credit goes to the real frontliners who are wearing PPE fighting the virus daily. I am declaring this because if I don’t, and some kaypoh learns about this later, I will get accused of being some kind of PAP mole sent by the COVID Taskforce to do PR. Such is the perilous nature of the internet this days. Do good also scared people find out. Allow me to make clear that my team and I are the grunts. We don’t get anywhere close to dunno what Ministerial Task Force. I want to clarify that I have had no access whatsoever to any kind of privileged information and everything that I will be talking about in this post comes from information that is publicly available online.
Let’s Role-Play MTF
Dr Tan wrote a lot of the usual opposition drivel about how the Government is bad and the PAP is incompetent. I am not going to be bothered to address those. I am not sure that there’s anything new there and the Government can jolly well deal with it when they are done fighting COVID. Not my problem. I will keep my analysis to COVID19 related issues.
To better understand the crisis and how to deal with the crisis, let’s pretend for a moment that we’re the Ministerial Task Force (MTF) for COVID19.
It is now Jan 2020. Wuhan is burning and it is in lockdown. We know that this is going to be a problem. We don’t know what we are dealing with exactly. We kiasi, quickly ban Wuhan, then we ban China and we form this dunno what MTF.
We don’t know what’s happening yet because the Chinese are too busy keeping their people from dying and studies have not been done. What do we assume? At this point, there are 2 choices: (i) we assume it’s going to kill us like SARS; and (ii) we can go with POTUS that this is just a “Chinese flu”.
We’re Singaporeans. Don’t be ridiculous. Of course we kiasi and assume SARS. We open the drawer and take out SARS SOP and execute.
Singapore’s ability to execute SOP is breath-taking. Clearly, if COVID19 were SARS, COVID19 would have been wiped out many times over.
To be fair, our initial execution was flawless. We were proclaimed the world’s Gold standard. So far, so good.
To Mask or Not to Mask, That is the Question
This is where a lot of self-proclaimed geniuses will tell you that the Government had failed when it told the population that they didn’t have to wear masks and then had to U-turn. 4 doctors had come out to say that they advocated the wearing of masks in Feb 2020. Why didn’t the Government listen?
This is where I will take a short break to scold the Government for saying that no need to wear masks because “masks not required.” Siao. You tell my grandma that it’s not effective my grandma also won’t believe you. How can be not effective? If not effective, the medical personnel wear masks for what? To look good ah?
Hold that thought.
At the same time, there are also complaints that supply of masks running out. People complain cannot buy masks.
People don’t know this *that* time, but we later know because of Madam Ho, what happened at the same time was that while ST had a N95 factory line and were ready to ship masks back to Singapore, Taiwan had banned us from exporting the masks back to Singapore? Do we announce this to the public so that we can all be pissed at Taiwan together? No cannot. Must diam diam. We announce this, we will create panic*.
* For now, all don’t panic and worry about masks -- confirm got enough: https://www.thinkchina.sg/china-will-have-too-many-mask-making-factories. Quality might be a problem but the supply is there.
Let’s come back to this question: should we make it compulsory to wear masks? This question needs to be answered at 2 levels
(i) Suppose we did make it compulsory to wear masks, and remember, this was pre-CB, so everyone is out as per normal. That means we will burn ~5 million masks a day. Dr Tan talks so much. Where is he and all the others who talk a lot going to cough up the masks? Talk is cheap hor. Keep in mind that our “supposed” friends are screwing us over and we don’t dare to announce publicly. If people want to know why we didn’t stockpile 5 million x 365 days worth of masks, don’t have to put up PQ, I tell you. SARS SOP didn’t need that. So yes, the PAP Government was not omniscient enough to know we will have COVID19 this year. Damn lousy lah. People should vote Dr Tan in next GE. He is clearly omniscient. Did anyone calculate how much 5 million x 365 days worth of masks would have cost us if COVID19 didn’t happen?
(ii) For the second level, did we *really* think we need to make everyone wear masks? It might be surprising that this is even a question, but it is -- and this is what separates the people who actually learnt something about probability in school and those who only know how to answer exam questions.
This is Jan-Feb 2020. Singapore has activated the world’s most efficient contact tracing system. Even single infected one we catch, we send to NCID. All their friends kenna quarantined. It seemed to work. That’s why we’re the gold standard. What does that mean? That means that even though we know there are likely some infected people that we haven’t yet identified and caught, we don’t expect them to be many. Conservatively, let’s say 100. With hindsight, that’s maybe too small, but at *that* point, that’s as good as it gets.
What is 100? Roughly, that’s probably the number of MediaCorp actors and actresses we have? I suspect MediaCorp has more. How often do you get to meet Zoe Tay or Fann Wong? I have never seen them in person in my life.
Note that you can only catch COVID from someone who has been infected. If there are only 100 of them running around, your probability of getting hemorrhoids is likely higher.
Let’s use an army analogy to make the situation more obvious. The masks are like bullets. If you are not likely to meet the enemy, you shoot the bullets for what? Conserve bullets when when they are needed and only the people likely to meet the enemy, i.e. firstline healthcare workers, should wear masks loh.
In other words, not wearing masks was the correct and most logical choice at that point. What other choice do people think we have? All wear masks, masks come from where? Dr Tan refers to this situation as a political consideration. Not enough masks is not enough masks simi sai political situation? Dr Tan and his 4 doctors can supply ah?
Basically, on the mask wearing issue, the Government did get the answer right (it was judged both impractical and of not urgent need), but got the working wrong, so kenna marked wrong.
Dr Tan mentioned that “To solve the shortage problem, the Government approached 400 suppliers in about 20 countries to buy more masks. At the same time, volunteers and female inmates from the Correctional Services were mobilized to help boost production of masks to 90,000 a day or 2.5 million masks a month.”
Implication is what? Singapore Government sleeping on the job and never go and try to buy masks? Well, what’s that ugly that looks like a bra, but not quite, in our house now? Dr Tan provide one or Hong Kong government procure for us he thinks?
But the story does not end there.....
On Testing and COVID numbers
But, before we go to the second part of this COVID saga, let’s take a brief intermission and talk about COVID numbers. I think that it’s v important for our students to learn about how to look at numbers and make sense of numbers. We have a Quantitative Reasoning (QR) module at NUS. I hope the instructors covered this example in class already.
First, the numbers are all wrong. It was obvious that the numbers coming out of China were all wrong. China was accused of under-reporting and lying about the seriousness of the situation. In fact, the chart coming out of China was surprisingly linear. Confirm fake lah!
Let me tell you this. If we look at the numbers coming out of the US, I can tell you almost certainty that the numbers are also under-reported. Confirm wrong. US also under-reporting and lying about their numbers?
So, what’s the moral of the story? Everybody lies?
As it turns out, there one big choke point that few people have talked about -- that’s testing. This COVID test is not some pregnancy test. You don’t happily go out to Watsons and buy one. Good for Korea for nailing this and really ramping up the tests. But most countries struggle, including us.
There are limits to how many tests can be conducted and processed. In fact, when we say that linear looking thing coming out of China, we were likely seeing the testing capacity rather than the actual number of cases.
So how do we make sense out of this lack of data? We look at the death rates. We take the country with the lowest death rate. I suspect it’s Singapore, but people can check. We’re at 0.06%. Basically out of every 10,000 infected, 6 die.
Let’s look at the US. They claim to have 1.65 million cases. They currently have a death rate 6%. That’s a hundred times higher than Singapore(!).
While we might believe that we have a better healthcare system in Singapore. Do we believe that we are 100x better? Not possible, so what we can do is to conservatively assume that their healthcare systems are overwhelmed and 2 to 3 times worse, so it might be reasonable to assume that their actual effective death rate should be say 0.2%.
What this suggests is that the situation in the US could potentially be 30x worse that what is officially reported. With the same approach, I had estimated the total number of cases in Wuhan was likely in the 300,000 range, when it was reported to be ~60,000.
The reader is encouraged to apply this simple methodology to get a sense of how bad things are in other countries. Generally, it’s probably *much* worse than what’s reported.
How and Why did Sh*t Hit the Fan?
It was all fine and dandy. We were all having our bubble tea, as the world went into chaos. Then what happened?
The methodology I used above is not rocket science. It would also be obvious to the MTF that things were rapidly going south overseas. What did we do?
We activated MFA and started evacuating our people from overseas. All our students on exchanged were recalled. Many were complaining.
As it turned out, many of these returnees were infected and we were not able to control the second wave, leading to the Circuit Breaker.
Was it a mistake to evacuate them?
I am glad that nobody suggested that we made a mistake in recalling our citizens. My view: We had no choice. We need to take care of our own.
The bigger problem was obviously are the foreign worker dorms. I am surprised that Dr Tan did not say anything about this and we went on and on this usual meaningless tirade against the Government that nobody probably cares to read. Nevermind, I do the job for him.
Let’s talk about the foreign worker dorms.
We have always had these NGOs, activists, dunno what, clamoring about improving conditions in the dorms, whatever lah. Generally, my impression was that we just have bunch of bleeding hearts trying to do. Good for them. Good for us. I mind my own business.
However, we now have this on-going narrative, that Government was completely at fault. If only the Government had listened to them and improved the conditions for the dorms, we wouldn’t have these massive numbers of infections in the dorms.
How many people believe this? Hands up.
Very good. Put your hand down.
Boys and girls, let talk about how to reason about this claim.
Suppose the Government has just listened to these NGOs. Every single one of these foreigner workers had their own single rooms with attached bathroom and sauna. Best in Singapore and Batam also. We throw in a cleaning auntie to do area cleaning for them and do their laundry. Just imagine that.
Do we believe that it would have allowed us to avoid the current problem with the foreign worker dorms?
Obviously, this would increase social distancing and *maybe* help somewhat. But guess what? The workers will still be eating together and working together. Do people understand how infectious this virus is? Even healthcare workers in full PPE can still catch it. Confirm will still kenna. Who are we kidding?
Keep in mind that we would not be requiring them to wear masks -- because our own people were not asked to wear masks then. You want to discriminate against these foreign workers?
My point: all these claims that acceding to the earlier demands of these NGOs and activists would have allowed us to avoid the current foreigner worker COVID situation is hogwash. Plain and simple.
Why are we misled into thinking that it would help? Because our brains are lazy. We want easy solutions. Part of it is also the Government’s fault. The Government didn’t offer us any reason for how and why the situation imploded in the dorm. Given the lack of an alternative, people just accept what is offered, hook, line and sinker.
I think it’s despicable for these groups to try to use this crisis to advance their lobbying. This is not the time. People also please don’t repeat stupid sh*t that you hear just because people say them. Use your brain to think about whether it makes sense.
There is a bunch of geniuses who say that if only we didn’t have any foreigner workers, there would not be any dorms and so there would be no foreign worker dorm problem. That statement is actually completely true. I shall leave it as an exercise for the reader to analyze the feasibility and helpfulness of that suggestion.
Root Cause of Foreign Dorm Infections
Keep in mind that we actually did have one foreign worker dorm incident even in the first wave. That was settled with military precision. People think about it. You might know that the foreign worker dorms are a risk, but if you get a case and it was handled quite easily, you would naturally think that the risk was manageable.
My hypothesis is that the real root cause for the foreign dorm infections was the humongous number of asymptomatic cases. To be fair, we always had this suspicion that there could be a small number of asymptomatic carriers. That the proportion could be up to 96(!)% was not apparent until after we had imposed the CB. By then, it was too late.
Why is it so hard for us and anyone to detect this earlier? Well, for the simple reason that there was a limited testing capacity.
If you had to choose who to test, would you choose the ones who look sick or the ones who look perfectly normal. This massive problem was likely detected when one dorm got hit and they did systematic testing in the dorms.
Maybe some people expect a Government that is more omniscient. They certainly have the option to vote in a more omniscient Government at the next GE. Our Tans seem to be pretty omniscient. :-)
Personally, I would be more circumspect and forgiving about the challenges of dealing with this enemy unseen.
Summary
Boys and girls, to conclude, I would like to summarize for you the key lessons that I would like you to remember:
(a) Data has context. It’s not simply a matter of how many infected cases a country reports. You need to understand where the data comes from and how it is obtained. The capacity limits for COVID testing means that we need to be wary about believing the data and it is not because anyone is intentionally under-reporting.
(b) Don’t just believe what people tell you. Just because people tell you that if the dorms were better everything would be ok, you don’t just believe them. You ask why should it be? Don’t just take a face value. Just because someone has a PhD, don’t just believe him. Heck, don’t even believe me. Derive everything again by yourself from first principles.
(c) Learn to use imagination and do thought experiments. Someone tells you, if you only listened to me and did this, everything will be good. Well, you just happily imagine that they were right and ask yourself, then what? The problem with this big mouths who talk a lot is that they just shoot off their mouths. They have no accountability to actually do anything. They have no sense of perspective, no sense of the costs and no sense of the practical constraints.
(d) Have a sense of perspective. We are not the only country to have massive numbers of foreign or migrant workers. I don’t believe that the living conditions of our foreigner workers are the worst in the world. Other countries have no COVID infections in their dorms or dorm-equivalents we think? Are people so naive? Note that as far as I know, we are the *only* country, where the PM has appeared on national TV to assure the foreign workers. To tell them, not worry, Singapore will take care of them. Think about that for a moment.
(e) School v Real Life. My complaint about school is that is often misleads our students into thinking that every problem has a model answer. Not true in life. There are situations where you know that sh*t is going to hit the fan and yet all you can do is to feel sorry for yourself while it happens in slomo. COVID19 is one such moment for Singapore. In times like this, we suck it up and wait to clean up after the mess is over.
On this note, all please be good. Stay home and stay safe! If you need to go out, observe safe distancing and wash your hands regularly.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/ben-leong/teaching-moments-from-fighting-covid19/10157484861167549/
