SINGAPORE — A civil servant who allegedly posted the number of new Covid-19 cases in Singapore to a private WeChat group, before the information was officially announced, has been suspended from her duties by her employer, the Ministry of Health (MOH).

The ministry said in a statement on Friday (April 24) that the 35-year-old Singaporean woman no longer has access to the ministry’s confidential information.

“MOH takes any wrongful access and communication of information by our staff seriously,” it said.

“Confidential information relating to Covid-19 cases is placed in a secured server that is only accessible by a restricted group of officers who require the information for their work.”

The ministry said that the woman, whose identity has not been revealed, had authorised access to the information as required for her work.

But she had allegedly used the access for “other unauthorised purposes”.

MOH said that following the incident, it would review its processes to ensure that the “necessary information security protocols are in place”.

On Thursday, TODAY reported that the police had arrested the civil servant for wrongful communication of information under Section 5(1) of the Official Secrets Act and unauthorised access to computer materials under Section 3(1) of the Computer Misuse Act.

On April 16 at 7.43pm, the police received a report from a member of the public, saying that the number of daily confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Singapore for that day had been leaked on an Instagram Story post, even though MOH had not officially released the figure.

Preliminary investigations revealed that the woman, an authorised recipient of classified information on Covid-19, had shared the figure with members of a private WeChat group.

“Members in the WeChat group, who were not authorised to receive the classified information, further disseminated the information before MOH officially released the information,” the police said.

Further investigations by the police revealed that the woman had done this on several other occasions.

Besides these, the woman had accessed MOH’s Covid-19 database without authorisation to retrieve confidential records of a person who tested positive for the disease. She provided the information to her friend.