Dr Tan Cheng Bock urges public to “stay calm”, “take care” and “be considerate”

Progress Singapore Party’s Secretary-General, Dr Tan Cheng Bock in a Facebook post on Sunday, urged the public to “stay calm”, “take care” and “be considerate” now that the ‘Disease Outbreak Response System Condition’ level in Singapore has been raised to “Orange” on Friday.

The former Central-Executive Member of the ruling party, pointed out that Singapore had overcome and learned invaluable lessons in outbreak management and spread containment when it faced the SARs virus in 2003.

“We then applied these lessons to counter subsequent threats such as the swine flu and the H1N1 bird flu.” wrote Dr Tan.

Dr Tan who was also a practicing doctor for 50 years, noted that the Wuhan virus — or officially referred to as 2019 novel coronavirus — is a new virus that the world has never seen before.

“Worldwide, governments and health professionals are sparing no effort combating this mutant strain – learning its behaviour, treating patients and hopefully finding a vaccine soon.”

Praising and reminding people that brave doctors, nurses, paramedics, hospital, laboratory and clinic staff are literally risking their lives to lead the fight. Dr Tan urges the public not to leave the fight to the frontline heroes as this virus is everyone’s problem.

Referring to how some people have acted in fear by storming the supermarkets to the extent that NTUC Fairprice has had to impose purchase limits for paper products, rice and instant noodles, Dr Tan said that while what the public can do may not seem much compared to the frontline heroes but “if everyone chips in, it will send a signal that we stand with them.”

For this, Dr Tan calls out for the people to do three things.