On Friday morning (14 February), employees working at Singapore’s Environment Building at Newtown were evacuated, according to Chinese-language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao.
The short report stated that the evacuation process was carried out after discovering a possibly confirmed case of the deadly coronavirus, or newly named COVID-19.
The Environment Building houses a number of government offices, which include the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources, National Environment Agency and Public Utilities Board.
Besides the evacuation, the Chinese newspaper also noted that some of the agencies located in the building have already started to split their teams up into different groups.
Mothership reported that employees working on level nine of the building were told to leave the premise.
However, it remains unclear if more than one level was affected.
Two days ago (12 February), 300 employees of DBS Bank were evacuated from their office at Marina Bay Financial Centre after an employee was confirmed to be infected with the novel coronavirus.
Those evacuated were told to work from home for the time being.
Additionally, its employees who are on a leave of absence would receive basic grocery packs while all staff employees would have access to a medical helpline, webinars as well as virtual doctors.
A DBS spokesman revealed that the infected employee was tested on Tuesday and the bank was informed of the confirmation on Wednesday morning.
As a precautionary measure, contact tracing is currently being conducted to identify those who were in contact with the affected employee are informed.
At the same time, the office premise including commonly used areas like lift lobbies and toilets, are also being cleaned thoroughly as a precaution.
As of Thursday (13 February), the Ministry of Health (MOH) confirmed and verified eight additional cases of COVID-19 infection in Singapore, bringing the total number of infected cases to 58.
In fact, Singapore has now become the country with the most infected cases of the deadly coronavirus outside of China.
Since last Friday (7 February), Singapore has also raised its disease outbreak response level to orange, one step below red.
