Qinthara Fasya | 10 January 2022
The decision comes after the CDC reclassified its Covid recommendation for Singapore earlier this week, saying the situation there was “unknown.”
In an emailed response to Bloomberg on Thursday (Jan 6), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it is working with Singapore’s Ministry of Health on Covid-19 testing findings and would update its Travel Health Notice for the Southeast Asian country accordingly.
The decision comes after the CDC downgraded its Covid recommendation for Singapore earlier this week, saying the situation there was “unknown.”
According to a second statement from the CDC to Bloomberg at the time, the issue was a lack of testing findings collected earlier from aggregator Our World in Data.
Officials in Singapore were taken aback by the designation. The city-state maintains significantly stronger testing and social distancing requirements than the United States, and its Ministry of Health publishes precise viral statistics online every day in English.
Singapore responded by saying it will share its Covid data with the CDC and the US embassy in Singapore. On January 5, Health Minister Ong Ye Kung told reporters, “Just to be clear, we know our condition extremely well.”
“The US CDC is not aware of our surveillance test statistics,” said Ong, co-chair of the multi-ministerial commission on Covid-19, adding that the prevalence of Covid-19 in our community is now “low and steady.”
