The narrative that Singapore's meticulous government "did everything right" and yet lost control of covid19 misses the fact that for months, they were warned about the conditions that 1/3rd of the workforce were living in. Now, they are the victims https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/04/21/singapore-lost-control-its-coronavirus-outbreak-migrant-workers-are-victims/?arc404=true

From @twc2sg 's Alex Au: “For the first two months, we engaged in a lot of self-congratulation. If anyone had cared to look, the dangers were already there.”

The early government response -- masks and sanitizer for all Singaporeans, etc. -- failed to take into account that in a pandemic, there's no "local Singaporeans" vs "low wage migrants" vs "expats". All of these resources started to flow into the dorms only after the outbreak

Last Thursday, more than a week after his dorm was declared an isolation area, a migrant worker shared a photo of his shared bathroom with us. There was no hand soap. Others see dorm mates taken away by men in hazmat suits without explanation. Their dorms are now heavily policed

This reality exposes something that was always true about Singapore and places like it -- the people who fuel growth and form the backbone of the city's entire infrastructure are the most overlooked; the "other": “the whole machinery of state operates as though they don’t exist"

Of all the covid19 stories I've covered, this one felt particularly crushing, thinking of all the comments I've heard growing up on how South Asian migrants were "dirty", that places they congregated on their days off should be "avoided", that they should be "grateful" for sg

Now, they are ~80 per cent of our coronavirus victims. What does that say about our society, our government, the entire system on which our country was built? (Photos by superstar and fellow Singaporean @ore_huiying who went through significant hoops to get this access)