S’pore PM fears pandemic could last a year

SINGAPORE: Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said on Thursday the coronavirus pandemic could last for a year or more and that the city-state would need to impose more travel restrictions to limit imported cases.

“Unlike SARS, this outbreak will continue for some time - a year, and maybe longer,” Lee said, adding that Singapore must prepare for a possible jump in coronavirus cases.

Singaporean authorities have imposed travel restrictions on virus hot spots China, Iran, South Korea and Italy so far, and Lee said in a public broadcast that it “will need to tighten up further temporarily.”

However, the prime minister said Singapore - which has reported 187 virus cases - was not raising its island-wide virus alert level and the situation there “remains under control”.

CORONA CAN LIVE IN PATIENTS FOR 5 WEEKS

WASHINGTON: Patients with the coronavirus keep the pathogen in their respiratory tract for as long as 37 days, a new study found, suggesting they could remain infectious for many weeks.

In yet another sign of how difficult the pandemic may be to contain, doctors in China detected the virus’s RNA in respiratory samples from survivors for a median of 20 days after they became infected, they wrote in an article published in the Lancet medical journal.

The findings have “important implications for patient isolation decision-making,” Fei Zhou from the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences wrote.

Currently, the recommended isolation period after exposure is 14 days to avoid spreading the virus. But if people remain contagious long after their symptoms have vanished, they may propagate the pathogen after they return from quarantine.