SINGAPORE, Nov 2 (The Straits Times/ANN): There was one new Covid-19 (coronavirus) cases confirmed as at Monday noon (Nov 2), the lowest since Feb 25 which had a single patient too.
The case is an imported patient who had been placed on stay-home notice on arrival in Singapore.
There were no new cases in the community or from worker's dormitories.
It was also the lowest number reported in eight months. Monday's new case takes Singapore's total to 58,020.
Singapore also only had four cases on Sunday (Nov 1) and they were also all imported.
The MOH said only two cases of community transmission have been recorded in the past week. The infections are not linked.
Hospitals and community isolation facilities discharged 11 patients on Sunday, bringing to 57,909 the number of people who have fully recovered from the virus.
There were 46 patients in hospital on Sunday, with none in intensive care, while 21 were recuperating in community facilities.
Singapore has had 28 deaths from Covid-19 complications, while 15 who tested positive have died of other causes.
Globally, the virus outbreak, which began in December last year, has infected more than 46 million people. Around 1.2 million people have died.
Meanwhile, dpa reported that a "breathalyzer" made in Singapore, could change the Covid-19 test format as a new breath test gadget for the coronavirus gets a second wind after successful first-round trials.
According to a statement by the National University of Singapore (NUS), the device, which resembles a drink-driving breathalyzer, generates a result in around 60 seconds.
The outcomes, which NUS reports as 90 per cent accurate among the 180 people tested, "are generated in real-time" by analysis of "Volatile Organic Compounds" in a person's breath.
Jia Zhunan, doctor and chief executive officer of NUS spin-off company Breathonix, said the test is "is easy to administer," needing neither trained staff nor laboratory processing.
Fast turnarounds make the breathalyzer "an attractive solution for mass screening, especially in areas with high human traffic," according to Jia, who is lining up final trials to "further improve the accuracy of the technology."
According to NUS, the virus detection "gold standard" is a swab test, which entails "diagnosis using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests" and "can take a few hours."
The accuracy of PCR testing has been questioned in recent weeks as officially reported case numbers surge again across Europe.
Concerns have been raised about both false positives and false negatives, as well as variable turnaround times that inhibit fast contact-tracing.
The NUS breath test is the second pandemic-related innovation to come out of Singapore in recent weeks. A team of doctors and engineers last month launched a robot swabber that could see vulnerable testing medics taken out of harm's way.
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