From Nov 6, Singapore will reopen its borders to travellers from China and Australia’s state of Victoria. This is a far cry from the situation in late January when Singapore had to close its borders to all travellers from China.

This change in circumstance mirrors these countries’ ability to bring down Covid-19 infection levels. China’s virus local incidence rate stands at 0.00009 cases per 100,000 people while that of Victoria is now 0.099 cases per 100,000 people. For Singapore, local cases of infection have fallen drastically, with no new cases reported for a few days in the last week.

As these countries begin reopening their borders and rebooting their economies, the question that remains foremost on many policymakers’ minds is: How have some countries managed to bring down infection levels and retain general socio-economic functioning, even as others continue to grapple with soaring infection rates?

In my research, I have found that countries that were able to weather the initial storm of the Covid-19 pandemic and quickly bring down infection levels shared one key characteristic: Excess capacity, or “slack”.

In organisational theory, slack refers to the excess capacities and resources that are maintained by an organisation in anticipation of crises and disruptions.

These capacities and resources could include money, excess inventory and productive capacity, as well as employees.

In all instances, slack exists when these resources are not fully utilised. Hence, during a crisis, these become resources and capabilities that can be mobilised to address any disruptions.

At the national level, such excess capacity typically exists in the form of national reserves, stockpiles of medical supplies and essential goods, as well as excess productive capacity.

For instance, Singapore was able to draw from its national stockpile of masks, food and essential items to quickly quell the panic buying that had emerged in the earlier phases of the pandemic.

Another country that was able to draw on national stockpiles is Finland, which avoided a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) by drawing from its large reserve of masks and PPEs.

As small and vulnerable states lacking natural resources, Singapore and Finland had established such stockpiles in anticipation of security threats and disruptions to regional supply chains.

In fact, the Finnish government is required under its Act on Ensuring Emergency Supply and Act on Mandatory Stockpiling of Medicines to maintain these stockpiles.

It is notable that neither the Singaporean nor Finnish healthcare system faced any shortages in PPEs.

This is in stark contrast to PPE shortages that had occurred across the United States and Europe.

While China did not possess similar PPE stockpiles, it was able to ramp up its productive capacity of masks and PPEs and hence similarly avert a shortage.

Aside from stockpiles, countries such as Singapore and China have both been able to mobilise large amounts of financial resources to fund the needs of their public healthcare system as well as stimulate the economy.

For Singapore, this involved four budgets totalling close to S$100 billion, a significant of which was devoted to maintaining employment as well as providing needy citizens with financial support and social assistance.

Like national stockpiles, this ability to mobilise financial resources requires a significant national reserve. For Singapore, this reserve has been built up over successive terms of government. Indeed, more than half of the S$100 billion was drawn from such past reserves.

There is therefore a clear lesson to be learnt here. Whether in terms of financial reserves or national stockpiles, there is a need to set aside a significant buffer of money, medical supplies and food for a country to weather massive pandemics and crises.

Given our vulnerability to strategic threats, the maintenance of such a buffer is a matter of national security.

MAINTAINING A BALANCE BETWEEN SLACK AND EFFICIENCY

While this notion of maintaining resource buffers or “slack” is hardly new to Singapore’s policymakers and citizens (we have after all maintained such reserves and stockpiles for a long time), it runs counter to the New Public Management (NPM) approach which has over the past two decades dominated public policy thinking across the Anglo-Saxon world.

Having emerged in the 1990s, the NPM approach emphasises resource optimisation and a “just-in-time” approach to managing national supplies and government resources.

Under this approach, idle resources such as stockpiles are associated with wastage and hence should be eliminated.

This lean approach to public service delivery can give rise to significant risks and disruptions during a crisis.

For instance, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam had admitted in early February that the city only had one month’s supply of surgical masks in its government’s reserve.

This led to a mad scramble for masks in the open market.

However, we should also be wary of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Governments are at the end of the day accountable to the public for how they spend and allocate public resources.

There remains a need to balance between maintaining sufficient slack for future crises and ensuring a certain level of efficiency so as to reduce wastage of government resources. 

One way of doing so is to introduce greater flexibility into the use of excess capacities, as Singapore has done to a certain extent. In doing so, excess capacities and idle resources can be made more fungible and "liquid".

For instance, 21 vacant public housing blocks in Redhill Close and two former school sites were refurbished to house foreign workers. This helped curb the spread of the coronavirus among the foreign worker population without the need to build up new dormitories from scratch.

PREPARING FOR DISEASE X

Covid-19 will not be the last pandemic that Singapore will have to deal with. As Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had noted during a Parliamentary debate in September, Covid-19 is not “Disease X”, a term used by scientists to connote the worst new disease that can befall mankind.

Yet the possibility of such a devastating disease continues to lie just beyond the horizon of our collective consciousness, ready to take the world by surprise, in much the same way that Covid-19 did.

There is no way to predict when or how such a disease will emerge. We can only prepare for such a crisis by maintaining the excess resources and capacities that can be mobilised during another outbreak.

Having managed to bring down our Covid-19 infections, Singapore will now need to continue building up its excess capacities, whether these are its national reserves or stockpiles, in anticipation of another future pandemic.

As Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan had mentioned in a recent interview, Singapore’s efforts to contain Covid-19 is simply a “dress rehearsal” that can help prepare us for a potentially more dangerous disease.

In the “new normal” that is our post-Covid-19 world of today (and tomorrow), it may be prudent to jettison old ways of thinking such as NPM and instead, set aside the resources and capacities that will help us prepare for future crises and disasters.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Woo Jun Jie is a policy researcher and author of the recently-published book Capacity-Building and Pandemics: Singapore’s Response to Covid-19.