Filthy floors, overflowing rubbish bins, and crowded dorms at migrant worker dormitories have exposed unsanitary conditions at privately run facilities where coronavirus infections have been surging.

Shocking photos and videos purportedly of a center run by the S11 Granuity Management company, whose Punggol dormitory was ordered on lockdown due to a COVID-19 outbreak, have spread online since yesterday.

While a recent spate of dormitory outbreaks has renewed debate about how Singapore treats its migrant workers, who helped build and develop the country, the images mostly drew scorn from netizens blaming the dorm residents for not keeping them clean.

“S11 Dormitory condition horrible…..” a caption read from one of the posts by Facebook user Jason See. Some of the videos he posted had also showed stagnant water on kitchen floors and long queues in common areas. He did not reveal how he obtained the images.

“S11 Domitory [sic] condition please take a look how is our Singapore standard of [dormitory] condition,” he wrote in another post showing unsanitary conditions and insect infestation.

COVID-19 outbreaks have sprouted in eight different migrant worker dormitories in Singapore in the past week, with the largest cluster of 88 cases located at the S11 Dormitory @ Punggol. The second biggest cluster was detected at the Westlite Toh Guan Dormitory, where at least 29 people have taken ill.

See’s images surfaced a day after Singapore announced a lockdown of both dormitories, putting around 20,000 migrant workers under quarantine as the country saw a record daily spike of 120 cases.

On Friday, PM Lee Hsien Loong ordered school and most workplaces closed, citing the unexplained spread of the virus.



Among those to criticize the migrant workers in See’s post, some in inflammatory terms, was Facebook user Isaac Tan.

“Those workers should be the one cleaning their own mess,” Isaac wrote. “Anyway Most of them throw rubbish everywhere and anywhere, just like in your own countries. Today you say, they clean, tomorrow they forget.”

Other responses have been more circumspect. Raising the longstanding topic of how Singapore treats the people it relies on to keep things running. Singaporean lawyer and former diplomat Tommy Koh labeled it “Third World” treatment.

“The way Singapore treats its foreign workers is not First World but Third World,” he said online yesterday. “The government has allowed their employers to transport them in flat bed trucks with no seats. They stay in overcrowded dormitories and are packed [like] sardines with 12 persons to a room. The dormitories are not clean or sanitary. The dormitories were like a time bomb waiting to explode. They have now exploded with many infected workers.”

Political writer Andrew Loh noted that the problem with poor living conditions among migrant workers was not new.

“Well, what else is new? Same old problems for 20 years – crowded dorms, bad and inadequate facilities, poor hygiene, poorly paid workers, etc. These problems have been raised to death.

Now, a virus has descended on the workers. We are witnessing a disaster in the making,” he wrote in a post yesterday.

View photos A packaged meal provided to migrant workers on lockdown. Photo: Jason See/Facebook More

While both Westlite and S11 have not addressed publicly the poor conditions on their premises, the Manpower Ministry said in a statement late last night that it was working with the two operators to “prioritise the well-being” of residents.