With B.C. now looking at a potential slow opening of the economy as soon as mid-May after the COVID-19 outbreak peaks, what may the path forward look like - and what are the potential pitfalls?
As COVID-19 first struck Asia in February, many Asian countries are now dealing with those questions as they are about 1-2 months ahead of the Canadian pandemic timeline. As such, Business in Vancouver is taking a closer look at a number of countries in Asia on how they dealt with the same re-opening questions that’s now facing B.C.
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For months, when the world was looking at examples of countries flattening the curve on COVID-19 and keeping their businesses open, Singapore was always among the the top of the list.
After the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan caused that city’s lockdown on Jan. 23, Singapore - the Southeast Asian metropolis city-state with a population of 5.7 million people - did not initially report a single day with new cases numbering beyond single-digits until March 6 (with 13).
In fact, the city’s new daily COVID cases figure - similar to what’s seen right now in B.C. - hovered between 20 and 80 for the entirety of March, and many observers noted the country’s aggressive contact tracing efforts in keeping infections down while letting schools and businesses continue to operate like normal. Social distancing, one local observers said, was scarce.
“If you show symptoms and test positive, you had to list every place you have been and every person you’ve had contact with over the last two weeks,” said Kirsten Han, independent journalist and curator of the newsletter “We, the Citizen” in Singapore. “Officials were very proactive at calling people, even employing the police to do so.”
That situation, however, has since changed dramatically. There are (as of April 23) 10,242 active COVID cases in Singapore. New daily cases surpassed 1,000 on most days this week, with April 20 seeing a spike of 1,426 new cases. The country is now on lockdown like much of the West, a move instituted by officials as a “circuit breaker” on the pandemic on April 3.
Han said Singapore’s case carries a lesson for cities like Vancouver with a large underprivileged community living under the mainstream radar. For Singapore, its source of the new COVID spike was the city’s 1.7 million non-residents, as many as 323,000 of whom holders of temporary work permits and living in the squalor of dormitories that have been criticized for lacking in proper sanitation.
The spike of cases began in late March, although the numbers jumped so suddenly that Han said she is almost certain there were unreported cases floating among the migrant worker population for weeks.
“There are so many cases now that it’s hard to believe this all exploded at once,” she said, adding she isn’t sure how much testing had been done in the dormitories to ensure the workers’ safety. “It shows that Singapore can be very efficient - for people who is considered to matter. That would be what the government calls the ‘local community,’ which would include the citizens, the permanent residents, as well as other long-term residents.
“For the migrant workers, the society doesn’t seem to think of these people as really being here in Singapore,” Han noted. “And that’s crazy to me, because many of these workers have been in Singapore for as long as 10 years; but because their work permits don’t provide a path to permanent citizenship, they are still considered temporary.”
Singapore’s temporary migrant worker population has been steadily rising for decades as the city’s rising role as a global economic hub required cheap labour. At the same time, these workers face restrictions in marrying locals and are often forgotten in the country’s discussions on social policy.
“These migrant workers… are the ones building the city,” Han said. “All these places like the Marina Bay Sands resort that’s in all the travel magazines, as well as the Jewel Changi Airport mall - which has an indoor waterfall and gets Singapore so much international press - they are all built by these workers. All the oil refineries here have many temporary workers working there. They clean the streets. They tar the roads. They prune the trees. Many are domestic workers who take care of our children and our elderly. They cook our food. They clean our homes.
“Really, Singapore runs on the back of these workers.”
Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada vice president of research Jeff Reeves said that it is now clear Singapore focused its early COVID-fighting efforts only on the white-collar part of the population - at the expense of blue-collar migrant workers.
“Keep in mind that almost 40% of Singapore’s population is foreign-born, and they’ve all come as part of an economic migration,” Reeves said. “So you have this large community of low-wage workers - mostly from South or Southeast Asia - living in very tight quarters who cannot work from home… To Singapore’s credit, they’ve identified this and reprioritized, but once the genie is out of the bottle, it’s very difficult to put it back.”
Han added the pandemic is exposing some structural faults with the way Singapore’s system is built, especially when it comes to offering these migrant workers legal protection of their rights to certain levels of quality-of-life.
“These workers are very disincentivized to report sick,” Han said. “They are entitled to some sick leave, but they may be afraid to take those days because employers are known to punish them for failing to show up to work, or to act annoyed when workers take sick leave. And for these workers, your right to stay in Singapore is tied to those employers; they can repatriate a foreign worker at any time.”
She also noted that she is concerned that Singaporean authorities will deem this as purely a dormitory sanitation problem - and that the fundamental issues of a “shadow community” within Singapore will not be addressed once COVID-19 passes.
As for the lesson B.C. can take away from this? Don’t ignore the communities that are at risk in the pandemic - even if society normally castes its gaze elsewhere.
“The virus has shown that, regardless of social and economic class, no one is safe unless everyone is safe,” Hand said. “The government in Singapore can continue to classify migrant workers in a different category as everyone else - they do that by calling these cases as ‘dormitory cases’ versus local ‘community cases’ - but the reality is, these workers are part of the community. You can verbally and physically segregate them, but in a pandemic, it’s impossible to pretend these people are not part of society.”
