MHA National Awards (COVID-19) Ceremony – Speech by Mr K Shanmugam, Minister for Home Affairs and Minister for Law

Home Team Colleagues

Ladies and Gentlemen

1. COVID-19 claimed more than 6.6 million lives around the world.

2. In every country, it was a test of the public’s trust in their government, and the ability of each government to handle the challenges that the pandemic brought.

3. I would say on reflection, Singapore did well.

4. Today, we celebrate and recognise the exceptional contributions of our Home Team officers in this national effort. We celebrate and recognise, but in context, we remember that people did die. It was a very difficult situation. So, it is more a recognition of the effort that the entire public service put in, including our officers, because otherwise many more people would have died.

Importance of Trust – Us vs Australia

5. In that context, let me start with something that the New York Times said last year, an article published in May last year. It compared the response to COVID in Australia and the United States (US).

6. It pointed out that the two countries have similar demographics, though of course the US population is much bigger.

7. New York Times highlighted that the much lower death rate, fatality rate, in Australia, was really due to a much better amount of trust that people had in government.

8. In Australia, there was trust in science, institutions and in one another. Australians trust each other, and that was a “life-saving trait”.

9. At the start of the pandemic, 76% of Australians said they trusted their healthcare system, whereas 34% of Americans said they trusted their healthcare system.

10. Australians were also more likely than Americans to agree that “most people can be trusted”.

11. In comparison, in the US, the handling of the pandemic, like everything else, simply became very politicised.

12. Questions of mask wearing and vaccinations were all divided along party lines – if you are a Democrat, you believed in mask-wearing, if you are a Republican, you think that that was some conspiracy cooked up by the Democrats. Vaccinations as well.

13. A Pew study found that Republicans were almost 10 times more likely than Democrats to be skeptical about masks or about the severity of the pandemic.

14. And the Washington Post reported in July this year that resistance to COVID vaccinations by Republicans could have contributed to the much higher rate of excess deaths amongst Republicans.

15. So, in summary, in the US, public health measures were politicised and there was low trust in the Government. Some felt that preventing the spread of the virus was itself an attack on personal freedom.

16. The result – the US suffered almost one million COVID deaths. Richest country in the world, one million. It is a shocking figure because that is more than the total number of Americans who died in WWI and WWII combined. The hundreds of thousands who died in the two world wars is still less than the number who died in the pandemic. It is a real tragedy. In comparison, Australia had around 7,500 deaths. If you normalise it for their respective population sizes, their death rate, fatality rate, was one-tenth of the US. For every one person in Australia, 10 people died in the US.

17. In Singapore, we were able to manage COVID. An effective centralised system, but also enabled by the high trust the public already had in the Government, in the healthcare system, in our public service, and in the measures that the Government rolled out.

18. If you look at the Edelman Trust Institute, it consistently finds that the trust in the Singapore Government is high. Currently, it is at a record high of 76%, much higher than the global average of 50%.

19. During the pandemic, we not only maintained this trust, I think it is fair to say that public trust in measures even grew, because measures were explained by reference to science and rationality.

20. We were not certainly not right all the time, we were not right 100% of the time. Everyone was dealing with uncertainty, and we were understanding the virus better as we went along. But when we were wrong, we were upfront and we said we were wrong, we had corrected ourselves, we said science now tells us something different.

21. For example, masks. In the early days, based on what we knew then, we had advised everyone to only wear masks when they were not well. But when the evidence showed that asymptomatic transmission was possible, we publicly changed our position, and mandated mask-wearing in all public places.

22. We explained our change in position, based on science. Our people trusted our decision, and complied with the policy.

23. This high trust allowed us to come together in many other ways as well to tackle the crisis.

24. Many Singaporeans came forward as volunteers to help distribute masks and implement safe distancing.

25. Hundreds of GP clinics joined the Public Health Preparedness scheme to treat those with respiratory symptoms.

26. Private hire car and taxi drivers volunteered to drive people with COVID to the hospitals.

27. We have to continue to work hard to maintain this public trust.

28. It is a key enabler for us to be able to introduce policies which are good for the country.

Professionalism: Looking at the UK

29. In addition to trust, it was also important for our response to be professional, and prepared, and for us to have taken the pandemic seriously.

30. Easier said, it looks like a simple statement, but it is neither to be under-estimated, nor taken for granted.

31. I don’t know how many of you are following the inquiry in the UK that has been going on. The last few days you saw the chief medical scientific adviser giving evidence. The BBC reported on it.

32. The senior scientific adviser said there was a “lack of urgency” in the UK Government.

33. He said in March 2020, he had showed projections of 4,000 to 6,000 deaths a day, and up to 250,000 deaths in total, if the UK Government continued with the limited measures it had in place.

34. He said senior government officials were slow to act.

35. There were also other allegations: that some in the Government were laughing while Italy imposed a lockdown in early March 2020, that they did not make plans, they said they would “sail through”, and, when they did end up taking steps, the leadership did not really understand the science and changed strategic direction every day. If you look at his evidence, he said it was very difficult to brief the leaders. They didn’t understand the graphs, they didn’t understand the science. Some understood during the briefing but as soon as the briefing was over, they forgot about it. Generally, there was neither an understanding nor preparedness to work on it. Yesterday or the day before, there was further evidence that scientific advisers from the different countries came together and talked to each other across Europe. One adviser said my prime minister doesn’t understand, my ministers don’t understand the graphs and the science. Everybody else laughed because they said our ministers also don’t understand.

36. Thankfully, here, Homefront Crisis Executive Group (HCEG) was very effective. It brought together the scientists, moved on that, briefings to the crisis team at the Ministerial level were effective and there were no problems with understanding the science, right at the top, and all the way down. And there was no difficulty moving decisively.

37. We put in place temperature screening and isolation procedures, and we set up a Multi-Ministry Taskforce to bring together all the resources and coordinate our response across Ministries and agencies.

38. MHA chaired the HCEG to oversee the management of the crisis.

39. The inter-agency Joint Taskforce involving the SAF, Home Team, MOM, MOH and various other agencies, was also formed, to manage the outbreak in the migrant worker dormitories.

40. In Singapore, it was all hands on deck to bring the country through the crisis, testing operations were ramped up, vaccination campaigns were ran, continued supply of essential goods was ensured.  The elderly and vulnerable -  some countries took the approach that no choice, they will die. We took the approach that they needed to be saved, and therefore, some of the steps were difficult for the economy, but they were necessary to protect the elderly and the vulnerable, and we took those steps, even though it was difficult for many businesses.

Role of the Home Team

41. The Home Team played an important role in all of this.

42. You watched the video earlier.

43. Many Home Team officers were at the frontlines, working around the clock.

44. Our officers handled the surge in demand for emergency medical services, they helped implement border controls, they conducted swabbing operations, and they secured Government quarantine facilities, amongst other things.

45. And Home Team officers who were not at the frontlines were also heavily involved, behind-the-scenes they were supporting the Multi-Ministry Taskforce and HCEG, doing contact tracing, supporting testing operations, and providing equipment and logistics.

46. All of you and many more, played a huge part in managing the pandemic, and in making sure that we emerged from the pandemic in reasonable shape, in fact, stronger than before.

Outcomes - Emerging Stronger

47. The outcomes speak for themselves.

48. As of 31 December 2022, we had about 300 COVID deaths per million. If you look at the chart, Singapore – 300; New Zealand – 450; Japan – 460; UK – 2980; US – 3,200. That is what governments can do. This is normalised for populations. You can’t say big countries, small place. In fact, a small city like Singapore with a much denser population is at a much higher risk, transmission should have been much greater, if not for the way it was handled.

49. These are real lives. So you see what you can do in public service. You helped save these lives. It was 450 COVID deaths per million in New Zealand, and New Zealand had a much tougher lockdown than us. 150 people more for each million, another 500 people would have died. If you went to UK levels, we should have had nearly 10,000 people dying, as opposed to the 900 people. Our families, friends, fellow Singaporeans, they were saved. In particular, the older Singaporeans.

50. Many lived because of you and other public service officers.

51. If you look at another metric: our excess mortality – in other words, how many more people died, from all the causes during the pandemic, versus the number of people who usually die if there was no pandemic. That was also much lower than many other countries. People might die from pneumonia or something else, but sometimes it is caused by COVID. So you take the total number of deaths without the pandemic, then the total number of deaths with the pandemic, what is the excess. The WHO estimated that the excess mortality for Singapore to be 26 per 100,000 in 2021, again much lower than many other countries. If you take Indonesia or India, they may not have said COVID, but a lot of people died during this period.

52. Separately, we talked about livelihoods. We also protected businesses and jobs through Government support such as the Jobs Support Scheme and Jobs Growth Initiative.

53. Without that, our 2021 unemployment rates might have been about 4 percentage points higher.

54. Our economy came back strongly by 2021. Real GDP grew by 7.6 percent. The recovery was considered very impressive, even by IMF, as we outperformed other economies, and surpassed our performance pre-COVID.

55. And I think, as a people, we have emerged stronger from the pandemic.

56. Pew did a survey in August 2022, 74% of Singaporeans felt that our country has handled COVID effectively, and significantly higher than all the other countries surveyed.

57. And 75% of Singaporeans felt that our country is more united than before COVID. We were the top-ranked country out of all the countries surveyed, and more than double the median of 32% for the rest of the world.

Conclusion

58. I am saying all of these because you played a part in making sure that these things happened, primarily to save lives, but the structure in Singapore, the people, the trust, all of it, was maintained and enhanced.

59. So, thank you to all our Home Team officers for your immense efforts and sacrifices in helping us overcome this pandemic.

60. And thank you also to your families for their support.

61. To all our officers, your contributions and conduct show the professionalism of the Home Team.

62. You have done the Home Team and Singapore proud.

63. Thank you very much.