Singapore and COVID-19 - Trust and Mitigating Pandemics

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In this episode, Dr. Hsu Li Yang chats with our host Maggie Fox about how Singapore managed the COVID-19 pandemic.

Singapore is a small country in Southeast Asia, but its experience with the first outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus – SARS – in 2003 and 2004 helped prepare leaders there for SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. Dr. Hsu Li Yang, Vice Dean for Global Health and program leader of infectious diseases at the National University of Singapore’s Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, lived through the first SARS outbreak and helped fight COVID-19.

While restrictions were tight, Dr. Hsu says they worked – and people saw they worked. “Trust currently has never been higher because people could see the success of how the pandemic was managed,” he tells us. What else worked in Singapore?

Dr. Hsu Li Yang is an infectious diseases physician who is currently Vice Dean of Global Health at Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore (NUS). He is also Associate Director of the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering, a Research Centre of Excellence on biofilms and microbial communities based jointly at Nanyang Technological University and NUS. Although he has been involved in COVID-19 research and education, his primary academic focus is in the area of antimicrobial resistance. He has worked with famed comic book artist Sonny Liew to publish educational comics on both COVID-19 and antimicrobial resistance.