When Sars-CoV-2 was detected in Singapore, the health authorities activated pandemic contingency plans to detect, isolate, and treat patients. While the country's healthcare system made preparations to cope with the expected increase in patient load, public communication initiatives by the health authorities were also introduced. These aimed to inform and educate the Singaporean public about the coronavirus and the illness that the disease caused: COVID-19.
We saw a need—and opportunity—for the introduction of a simple, yet clear, creative and effective way of explaining things to the average person, who we believed sometimes struggle to understand and absorb the overwhelming mass of information and data being put out by national and global authorities. At the same time, we also sensed an opportunity for the NUS medical school to get our public health, epidemiologists, virologists, and infectious disease experts to step up and share their knowledge, and extend the school's educational reach beyond Singapore's shores. We had the medical expertise and knowledge in our faculty, as well as the hard-won experience gained from Singapore's brutal encounter with an earlier coronavirus epidemic in 2003—Sars—and wanted to share what we had learned.
