48-year-old man who recovered from Covid-19 dies after fainting at temporary housing site for migrant workers

SINGAPORE - The Republic has recorded its 11th case of a patient who tested positive for the coronavirus but died from other causes.

The Ministry of Health (MOH) in its Tuesday evening (June 23) update said a 48-year-old male Indian national who was earlier assessed to have already recovered from the coronavirus died from ischaemic heart disease.

He fainted on Tuesday morning at a temporary housing site for migrant workers and was taken to the emergency department at Singapore General Hospital.

He tested positive for Covid-19 on May 15.

MOH has said that only cases where the primary or underlying cause of death is attributed to Covid-19 are added to the official death count. "This is consistent with international practice for classifying deaths," it said.

Meanwhile, the Seoul Garden restaurant at Northpoint City has been added to the list of public places visited by Covid-19 patients while they were still infectious.

An infected community patient was there on June 19 from 8.05pm to 9.40pm.

The ministry provides this list of locations that Covid-19 patients have visited for more than 30 minutes to get those who were at these places to monitor their health closely for two weeks from the date of their visit.

It has said that close contacts would already have been notified and that there is no need to avoid these places as they would have been cleaned if needed.

The full list can be found on MOH's website.

The three community cases reported on Tuesday, comprising a permanent resident, a work pass holder and a work permit holder, were all picked up by the ministry's active screening.

All are asymptomatic. The PR works at a dormitory while the work pass and work permit holders work in essential services.

Further tests showed that the PR was likely infected some time ago and is no longer infectious. Results for the other two are pending.

All three community cases are currently unlinked to known cases.

Migrant workers living in dormitories make up the remaining 116 cases, taking Singapore's total to 42,432.

Tuesday's figure was the lowest reported daily since April 7, when 106 new Covid-19 infections were confirmed. It is also lower than the average of 213 new cases per day in the past seven days.

The average number of new daily community cases has come down from seven cases two weeks ago to four in the past week. The average unlinked community cases per day remains stable at two over the same period.

Also on Tuesday, the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) said 31 more dormitories and four blocks of recovered workers in three additional purpose-built dorms have been cleared of Covid-19.

This means about 3,700 more workers can potentially be allowed to return to work, bringing the total number of those cleared of the virus to about 79,000 migrant workers.

However, only about 17,000 of these workers can actually restart work, with the rest able to do so only after fulfilling conditions like downloading the TraceTogether mobile app for contact tracing purposes.

There are 323,000 migrant workers in dorms in Singapore.

With 405 new cases discharged on Tuesday, 35,985 patients have fully recovered from the disease.

A total of 192 patients remain in hospital, including one in the intensive care unit, while 6,219 are recuperating in community facilities.

Singapore has had 26 deaths from Covid-19 complications, while 11 who tested positive have died of other causes.

This article was first published in The Straits Times. Permission required for reproduction.

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