Singapore Braces for a Leap of Faith in Its Covid Strategy
- Nation struggles with outbreaks as it plans post-virus life
- Singapore trapped as cabin fever rivals a fear of fatalities
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Singapore is aiming for a feat no country has achieved so far: reopen to the world and emerge from the pandemic with a death toll still in the double digits.
While the U.S. and U.K. have plowed headlong into reopening their economies, their failure to contain the virus early on resulted in hundreds of thousands of fatalities. Vaccine hesitancy is also providing a reality check for strategies that treated inoculation as the magic bullet. At the other end of the spectrum, places like Australia and New Zealand managed to avoid the pathogen almost entirely, but slow progress with shots means they’re unable to lift the border controls and quarantines that keep them isolated.