1,375 dengue cases were reported last week, making it the highest number of weekly cases ever recorded in Singapore since 2014.
The record-breaking figure suggests that Singapore might be heading for a big year, wrote Assistant Professor Hannah Clapham in a commentary zooming in on our battle against two outbreaks: COVID-19 and Dengue.
While the ‘circuit breaker’ has managed to reduce person-to-person contact thereby stabilising the COVID-19 outbreak, it seems to be doing the opposite for dengue, which spreads from human-to-mosquito-to-human.
Dr Clapham noted that a combination of factors may contribute to the number of dengue cases. They include the weather, numbers of mosquitoes, human exposure to mosquitoes, virus serotypes and population immunity.
While the National Environment Agency (NEA) has stepped up responses including fogging, breeding sites removal and introduction of Wolbachia mosquitoes, “the actions we are being encouraged to take ourselves can make a difference to transmission,” highlighted Dr Clapham.
“For example, clearing breeding sites in our homes and wearing mosquito repellent works to reduce the numbers of contacts with mosquitoes or the risk of an infectious contact via a bite from a mosquito,” she elaborated.
For Singapore in 2020, one of the big worries with having both COVID-19 and dengue at the same time is that there will be large numbers of patients seeking care leading to an overwhelmed healthcare system thus affecting hospitals’ capacities to provide other services.
We are currently in a phase of rapid growth of dengue cases, and given the weather currently, growth can, unfortunately, be predicted to continue, and this must be planned for.
As always in public health, hopefully, our actions mean that this prediction will be wrong.
Read the full commentary here: