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Singapore's COVID-19 Catastrophe: Authoritarian bungling, an infectious election, and an international humanitarian crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Fangpi Liao
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Abstract

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Singapore earned early plaudits for its management of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the government's failure to pay attention to the health of the country's sizable foreign worker population and its refusal to heed the repeated warnings from infectious disease experts and advocacy groups has led to a major outbreak in cramped dormitories and a lockdown of the entire country. Later, as caseloads dropped and citizens received cash handouts, the ruling People's Action Party staged an election in the hopes of receiving an overwhelming electoral mandate, even as infections remained a serious public health concern. The opposition received its best-ever result, further calling Singapore's elitist partystate governance model into question.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 18 , Issue 15 , August 2020 , e7
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2020

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