Quora Answer: Has the Singapore Government Made the Right Decision to “Live with the Virus”?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “As of February 2022, has the Singapore government made the right decision to ‘living with the virus’ and end travel restrictions in view of the dominance of Omicron?” 

The virus is not going to go away anytime soon.  We are likely to continue to see further variants.  However, with the vast majority of the population vaccinated, and other measures in place, we have ensured that it would unlikely that our healthcare system would be overwhelmed with severe cases of infection.  This means that we have largely addressed the policy contentions on the healthcare front, as well as resilience of the population. 

Th next step is to address the economy.  There is no point in keeping the population cloistered if we are all eventually killing ourselves economically.  Singapore is an international trade and business centre.  Our standard of living is dependent on us maintaining our competitiveness.  We were always going to open up.  We only needed our major trade partners to get the pandemic under reasonable control and open their borders before we reciprocated.