As per government data, three-quarters of COVID infected patients in the last four weeks in Singapore are among those already vaccinated. The city state has observed the world’s second highest vaccination count next to the United Arab Emirate, after inoculating close to 75% of its 5.7 million people, the Reuters tracker shows.
As per Reuters report, Singapore reported 1,096 locally transmitted cases in the last 28 days, 44% or 484 of which were fully vaccinated people. 30% of these cases were partially vaccinated, while the remaining 25% had not been vaccinated.
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“There is continuing evidence that vaccination helps to prevent serious disease when one gets infected,” the ministry said in a statement, emphasising that all of the fully vaccinated and infected people showed milder to no symptoms.
“As more and more people are vaccinated in Singapore, we will see more infections happening amongst vaccinated people,” dean of the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at the National University of Singapore (NUS), Teo Yik Ying told NDTV.
“It is important to always compare it against the proportion of people who remain unvaccinated…. Suppose Singapore achieves a rate of 100% fully vaccinated… then all infections will stem from the vaccinated people and none from the unvaccinated,” he added.
Linfa Wang, a professor at Duke-NUS Medical School, told NDTV that old people have weaker immune responses upon vaccination. Similarly in Israel, which also has a high vaccination rate, according to health authorities, almost half of the 46 patients hospitalised in severe conditions in early July were vaccinated, and the majority were from risk groups.
The Delta variant has become the most common strain in Singapore in the last few months. It is unclear whether the data is the reflection of reduced protection by vaccines against the Delta variant.
Singapore’s national vaccination programme involves the use of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and Moderna.
