Singapore running out of luck

For several decades, nothing could go wrong in Singapore. And if anything went wrong, they would be put right immediately. The last outbreak of contagious disease was SARS and was quickly wrapped up and put away. We had many other problems but did not become too big a task to solve.

What is happening today? We have endless breakdowns on the public transport system after paying so many years of fare hikes for better services but with things getting worse by the days. We have outbreak of TBs, Hepatitis C, and now this Zika thing. How dreadful are the lives of pregnant mothers infected by the Zika sickness is beyond your imagination. Day and night, every moment, the mother and father would be thinking of their little unborn baby’s health. Would the baby be alright or born with brain damage? The latter is the fearful tragedy that could likely be their fate. What about little children infected with TB in kindergartens? If only you are the parents of the affected child.

Why were we so successful then and not now? Was it because we have had better people and better systems then and now no talent but highly paid people today with lousy systems? Very likely it is more like luck running out. For we are having the best talents from the world, oops, to be correct from the third world, to replace our own talents, and this is the result. This is one of the facts that we are living with but still needs empirical proof to connect the two.

If not this, then, assuming the people are still as talented and the systems have been improved, why then are we getting all the outbreaks? Luck running out! When luck runs out, the best system will still be found wanting. When luck runs out, poorly devised systems, half baked systems, tidak apa attitude, etc will stand out glaringly.

When luck runs out, all the wrong things will happen at the same time to wreck the system and the lives of the people here. How many more bad things are going to happen before the whole system implodes? 4 days of train faults and fuming commuters, and more and more Zika cases being detected and more mothers to be infected, and more coming along the way. When you have a few cases of infection, contact tracing is quite easy. When you have hundreds and thousands, you can forget about contact tracing.  Watch out for this Zika to develop into a full blown epidemic and woe beholds this little Red Dot. Complacency?