Day 26 of Singapore's COVID-19 Circuit Breaker - Gradual Easing

Singapore is now 26 days into the circuit breaker (the government's fancier term for a quasi-lockdown). When our Prime Minister delivered the May Day message 2 days ago, I thought he seemed more radiant and jovial. In his speech, he also mentioned that the government will be able to ease the circuit breaker measures soon if the case counts become manageable.

Source

That to me was a strong hint from the government that things are under control and the measures are working. I then told my family members that I think the government will be easing the COVID-19 measures quite soon. Sure enough, the government announced today that some of the measures can be eased as early as 5 May.

TCM acupuncture will be allowed from May 5 for pain management where deemed essential by practitioners, while registered TCM practitioners will be able to sell retail products to meet the needs of Singaporeans. Activities like walking and exercising, previously disallowed on the ground of private condominium estates, will be allowed to resume, though common facilities like swimming pools and gyms will have to remain closed.

Then from May 12, selected businesses such as barbers, home-based businesses and laundry services will be allowed to resume operation. However, they would still have to abide by the precautions in place before April 21, when Singapore further tightened its circuit breaker measures. For instance, hairdressers can offer only haircuts.

Source

---

Case counts update

For the past few days since my last update, Singapore was able to keep our daily case count to 3 digits. Today, we see a preliminary number of 447 new cases.

Source

The numbers might still seem overwhelming but that is largely because we are doing a lot more testing than most other countries.

As you can see from the table above, Singapore is doing more tests per million population than Hong Kong and even South Korea. These 2 places are known for their aggressive testing to have brought down the number of cases substantially. With more tests, there will naturally be more discovered cases. However, most of these cases are asymptomatic or mild. This is pretty evident from the low death rate and serious complication rate.

---

Productive day

Anyway, even though the world is mostly under lockdown, that does not mean that you cannot be productive. I managed to attain my Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSK) today and I am now a certified cloud security practitioner!

The CCSK is a reputable certificate for individuals in terms of cloud security and it provides evidence that an individual has successfully completed an examination covering the key concepts of the CSA (Cloud Security Alliance) Guidance, the CSA CCM, and the ENISA (European Union Agency for Cybersecurity) whitepaper. If any of you are interested to find out more about this certificate, leave a comment and I will write a full post on it.

Apart from getting the certificate, I also received my newly bought computer chair and assembled it.

How does it look? Since the circuit breaker measures are extended, I thought I need a better chair for working from home. My back and neck were starting to ache as my previous chair wasn't that comfortable 😅.

What did you do during this lockdown period? Leave a comment and share with me.

---

20% of post rewards goes to @ph-fund to support Project HOPE. Head over to their website to find out more.