The Singapore government is committed to increasing stability in the daily infection count by further reductions in community transmissions through the implementation of several guidelines on social interactions. The objective of the Ministry of Development’s planned program is to improve COVID-19 resilience by enhancing public safety practices to lower the number of new infections among immigrant workers and untraceable transmissions among local residents.
According to Haldane et al. (2021), resilient health systems focus on delivering high-quality care while absorbing the undesirable impacts of emerging health needs, sustaining health improvement, providing people-centered services, and maintaining advances in health functioning.
The World Health Organization’s health system building blocks framework identifies information, leadership and governance, service delivery, medical technologies and products, health workforce, and healthcare financing as the most important determinants of a public health system’s effectiveness.
The SARS pandemic demonstrated communities’ vulnerabilities to public health catastrophes and underscored the importance of preemptive actions to restrict further outbreaks and reduce transmission rates. In this regard, implementing coordinated efforts against emerging public health issues and improving national surveillance against infectious diseases is crucial to addressing citizens’ concerns about their health safety. This is particularly necessary to prevent the widespread panic that causes worried individuals to overcrowd medical facilities for mild symptoms of respiratory diseases unrelated to COVID-19 under the current environment.
The Ministry of Health Singapore (2021) pointed out that the growing number of mild COVID-19 cases reported in hospitals is increasingly overwhelming the country’s response and healthcare systems and reducing the effectiveness of control measures. However, Myers (2021) argued that engaging the public in public health information systems helps in diminishing threats associated with disinformation. As such, providing reliable and sound information is necessary to facilitate policy implementation, service delivery, health education, and regulation to realize sustained reductions in new infection cases.