A Sudden Coronavirus Surge Brought Out Singapore’s Dark Side - The New York Times
►https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/magazine/singapore-coronavirus.html
The Infectious Diseases Act, instituted in 1976 and repeatedly updated with the emergence of new diseases such as H.I.V. and SARS, grants the state far-ranging powers to enter private premises, force people to immunize their children and, most crucial, criminalize acts detrimental to community health. From the earliest cases of the novel coronavirus, the government made it clear that lack of cooperation with health officials would be treated as a crime. Ordinary, errant Singaporeans have been showily prosecuted, photographed outside the court, their misdeeds blasted on the news as a warning. A man who had been quarantined upon returning from a trip to Myanmar, then ventured to a food court for pork-rib stew, got six weeks in jail. A shopper who cursed in a supermarket argument over face masks could get a prison sentence. A Singapore citizen who traveled to Indonesia in violation of his stay-at-home notice had his passport suspended.
But despite all the threats, through collective complacency or failure of imagination, the government was blindsided by a vulnerability it might have easily anticipated. In April, a dramatic surge of infections among poorly paid foreign workers crushed Singapore’s sense of invulnerability. The city is built and maintained by an army of laborers who come from other Asian countries — Bangladesh, India, China. They can be lodged as many as 20 men to a single room; one toilet is legally considered enough for 15 people. Last year, some of the dormitories suffered a measles outbreak. Migrant-worker housing has been connected with illness ever since the British colonial rulers called tuberculosis “a disease of the town-dwelling Chinese” because it raged among the “lowly paid migrants living en masse in congested and insanitary dwellings in the municipal area,” Loh and Hsu write. In other words, the notion that packed worker lodgings could weaken public health was neither new nor surprising.
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