Experience of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in Singapore: Importation of Cases, and Defense Strategies at the Airport
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The importation of SARS was responsible for the outbreaks in Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Canada at a time when this new disease had not been identified. We report the incidence and impact of cases of SARS imported to Singapore between 25 February and 31 May 2003, and describe national measures to prevent further importation. METHODS: Information on imported cases of SARS and measures taken at entry points to Singapore was retrieved from the Ministry of Health and the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore. RESULTS: Of the 6 imported cases, which all occurred before screening measures were implemented at the airport, only the first resulted in extensive secondary transmission. Of 442973 air passengers screened after measures were implemented, 136 were sent to a designated hospital for further SARS screening; none was diagnosed as having SARS. CONCLUSIONS: The SARS outbreak in Singapore can be traced to the first imported case. The absence of transmission from the other imported cases was probably a result of relatively prompt identification and isolation of cases, together with a low potential for transmission. New imported SARS cases therefore need not lead to major outbreaks if systems are in place to identify and isolate them early. Screening at entry points is costly, has a low yield and is not sufficient in itself, but may be justified in light of the major economic, social and international impact which even a single imported SARS case may have.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".