Covid-19: Dip in number of patients who need oxygen support, in ICUs

SINGAPORE — The number of Covid-19 patients in Singapore who are in serious condition and need oxygen support to help them breathe dropped to 30 on Tuesday (Aug 17), down from 33 the day before.

And there were six patients under intensive care — one fewer than the day before.

Data from the Ministry of Health (MOH) showed that among the six patients in intensive care units (ICUs) and 30 with serious illness, eight were fully vaccinated.

Of those who have fallen very ill, 31 are seniors above 60 years old, of whom 25 are not vaccinated or partially vaccinated, the ministry said.

MOH said there is continuing evidence that “almost all fully vaccinated individuals do not suffer serious disease when infected unless they had underlying medical conditions that made them more susceptible”.

“Over the last 28 days, the percentage of unvaccinated who became severely ill or died is 9.6 per cent, while that for the fully vaccinated is 1.4 per cent,” it added.

There are 404 Covid-19 patients who are hospitalised as of Tuesday.

NO NEW CLUSTERS

There were no new Covid-19 clusters reported on Tuesday and six have been closed.

There are still 93 active clusters here, each having between three and 1,155 cases.

Earlier on Tuesday, MOH said that there were 52 new locally transmitted Covid-19 cases, including 14 that were not linked to earlier infections.

For the 38 cases linked to confirmed cases, 35 had already been placed under quarantine and another three were detected through surveillance testing.

Among the cases was a senior aged above 70 who is not vaccinated and is at risk of serious illness, MOH said.

Besides the community cases, there were four imported infections, making it a total of 56 new Covid-19 cases confirmed on Tuesday.

Three of the imported cases were detected on arrival in Singapore and the remaining one developed the illness during stay-home notice or in isolation.

Overall, the number of new cases in the community has dropped from 481 in the week before to 322 in the past week.

The number of cases with no known links in the community has also gone down from 135 in the week before to 91 in the past week.

The seven-day moving average number of all linked community cases and all unlinked community cases are 33.0 and 13.0 respectively.

The total number of Covid-19 cases in Singapore is now 66,281.

VACCINATIONS

As of Aug 16, 76 per cent of the population had completed their full regimen or received two doses of Covid-19 vaccines, and 82 per cent had received at least one dose.

In addition, 151,089 doses of other vaccines recognised in the World Health Organization’s Emergency Use Listing such as Sinovac have been administered as of Aug 16, covering 83,968 individuals.