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Singapore is interesting (I looked because I'd a trip booked there in May).
They appear to be forensically investigating the transmission path (see link for an example). Whether they are able to do this because of the resources they have and the smallish numbers of identified cases, or the nature of the society/population, I don't know. However, the info might inform the government strategy.
peter_h-
Going through this issue in Singapore there’s a few things that I can share from first hand experience.
Contact tracing is a great thing, every company is staffed with a huge percentage of ex armed forces personnel (military service of 2 years) which from my experience has really helped to take control of the government messaging.
WhatsApp message from the MOH with no more than 2 updates per day keeps everyone informed on what’s happened and where.
It also helps that there’s less than 6M people, hardly any unemployment, more than decent social care, no democracy or freedom of speech, no fake news law which has been invoked multiple times in the last 2+ months and that’s it’s a tiny ass island.
To do what they’ve done on a much larger scale is nearly impossible I’d say.
Right now about 60% of new cases are imported and the remaining ones are linked to known clusters.
jaw
Thanks. As stated- I couldn't find it in the mire of twitter posts and articles.
As @Chalfie says, it still represents a possible misunderstanding of causality- ie- herd immunity is a potential outcome of the policy, not the policy itself.
Vallance's response to Hancock's article will be interesting reading...
I do think we need to step back a bit from demanding unproven strategies, and yes- this means potentially trusting our total omnishambles of a government.
Neither Taiwan nor Singapore shut schools or workplaces (though Taiwan kept schools closed following Lunar New year for 2 weeks).
Hong Kong- which has been seemingly similarly successful- shut everything.
Countries that have shut everything down have had mixed responses, with predominantly worse outcomes than Singapore, say.
Nothing is proven to work- arguments against Taiwan, Singapore and HK may include the fact that there could be undertesting, they could be early in the viral spread, etc, etc.
Retrospectively- we can assess.
Proactively- we can plan based on best evidence. This brings the unpalatable possibility that the decision made was incorrect.