SINGAPORE: I felt something akin to nostalgia when I visited the Joint Testing and Vaccination Centre at Kaki Bukit last week to get a COVID-19 booster jab.
This was the location where, almost exactly a year ago, I received my last booster. And while the COVID-19 landscape in Singapore has changed in the ensuing 12 months, nearly everything at the centre was reassuringly familiar.
There were the very friendly members of staff helping to guide people quickly and efficiently through the process, from registration to injection to observation.
Just like the last time, a small, circular sticker was issued to indicate which vaccine each person had elected to get – green for Pfizer, yellow for Moderna (having been a Moderna man before, I decided to mix it up a little by asking for the Pfizer jab). And there was the handing over of the leaflet telling me to limit physical activity for the next couple of weeks.
In fact, the only thing that differed from my last visit was that there weren’t many people getting their jabs. In the observation room, I was one of three people.
A year ago, the place was busy enough for there to be slight pauses at each stage of the process as the staff worked their way through the steady stream of people wanting to get protected.
This time round, I walked through the process very quickly, being dealt with immediately at every stage. Admittedly, this was on an early Friday evening, which is perhaps a time when many people were out and about doing other things.
Nonetheless, I expected the centre to be busier. With Singapore experiencing a spike in COVID-19 infections and with declining resistance cited as one of the reasons for this, I thought that many people would have used that as a prompt to get up to date with their vaccinations.
The estimated number of COVID-19 infection cases for the week of Dec 10 to Dec 16 was the highest recorded for the year, with 58,300 cases for epi-week 50, up from the previous record of 56,043 cases in the preceding week.
A total of 965 new COVID-19 patients were admitted to hospitals in the same week, up from 763 the previous week.