[Reporter: Terrence McKenna] In mid-January
a tour group from China landed in Singapore and took in all the sights.
The harbour, the famous Marina Bay hotel
and they stopped at the little-known Yong Thai Hang medicine shop.
After they left, the shopkeeper came down with COVID-19.
Singapore's first-class public health system swung into action.
To start, hospital contact tracers tracked down everyone the shopkeeper had been exposed to.
Then everyone the Chinese tourists had encountered.
Then everyone who had shared the same taxis used by infected people.
Credit card records and security camera video were accessed.
As the contact tracing job drew larger police were brought in to help.
And then the army.
The coronavirus outbreak was almost shut down in its infancy.
Professor Leo Yee-Sin is the executive director of Singapore's National Centre for Infectious Diseases.
Well, the other good things about the Singapore being very small
is that it's completely wired up.
It is all connected through the latest IT system.
So it gave us advantage in terms of contact tracing.
[Reporter] Singapore also moved quickly to mass testing.
We test a lot and I think because we test a lot
we tend to pick up people that are relatively in the early phase of the clinical illness
[Reporter] But it wasn't enough.
In mid-February
COVID-19 found Singapore's weak spot.
The so called guest worker system.
1 million foreign workers.
Nearly 20 percent of Singapore's population are mostly from Bangladesh and India.
They slave away for very low wages.
Sometimes 20 dollars a day.
They live in company dormitories
often packed in 10 or 20 to a room
Up to 100 men might share a toilet.
Kirsten Han is a Singapore freelance journalist.
If a migrant worker is ill, he's not going to say that he's ill
because he's afraid of what happens if he takes sick leave.
Because his employer might be unhappy.
He might get fined for taking sick leave.
He have his work permit cancelled and be repatriated.
[Reporter] The first migrant worker migrant worker infection was registered on February 8th.
Then the virus showed up at the giant Mustafa shopping complex.
The Mustafa supermarket basically caters to a lot of foreign workers.
Full range of commodities.
They can get anything they want anything from their own hometown that they need
and that stuff is one of the amplifiers among the foreign workers in Singapore.
[Reporter] In early April, guest workers were confined to their dorms
and the economy ground to a halt.
I think with the density of the dormitories
and the fact that this isn't the first disease outbreak to happen in dormitories.
We've also seen measles and dengue and Zika and things like that.
There should have been more attention paid
to how vulnerable these communities were to an outbreak.
And if you wait for the outbreak to happen before something gets done
in an environment where men are living in such close quarters
then you're always playing catch-up.
[Reporter] The crisis may have brought out the worst in some Singapore residents.
Ja Ian Chong teaches political science at the National University of Singapore.
The infection in migrant worker dorms I think is uncovering a lot of the nastiness
and frankly our racism that have been latent in Singapore society for for a long time.
People saying well these migrant workers, they're dirty by culture.
They're dirty and they have it good here in Singapore
why are they demanding more.
That they sort of deserve there a lot.
Those kinds of sentiments are coming out in a way that is a lot less varnished than before.
[Reporter] In a TV address to the nation on April 30th
Singapore's prime minister Lee Hsien Loongbent bent over backwards
to express his appreciation and concern for the guest workers.
I too send my thanks and good wishes to all migrant workers in Singapore
for what you have built and contributed here.
[Reporter] While in parliament, the Health Minister underlined that it was in everyone's interest
to come to the aid of the men in the infected dormitories.
Otherwise we will continue to be at risk of a spillover from the dormitories into the wider population.
[Reporter] The government quickly built up temporary facilities to quarantine the infected guest workers.
The beds kept the men six feet apart.
Probably because workers are young and healthy
the death rate in Singapore is still very low.
Some robots brought the their food and medicine.
Other robots allowed them to remotely consult doctors.
They seemed wild for automation in Singapore.
The robot dog that leads people around in quarantine.
The robots security officer that cautions people to socially distance while they are exercising in the park.
[Voice Over] Play your part in fighting COVID-19 with just 2 simple steps.
[Reporter] On March 21st
the government began encouraging all citizens to load a new contact tracing app
called Trace Together into their cell phones.
The app will keep a log on the phone
of every other device that shared close contact with the owner over a 14 day period.
Information that would be turned over to health authorities if the cell phone carrier became infected.
So far it's not a great success.
Since then we've learned that a very small number of Singaporeans
about 1.1 million Singaporeans have downloaded it
which is quite far off from the 3-plus million that they actually need
before it becomes effective in contact tracing.
[Reporter] Singapore residents may feel that in a crisis
it's OK to share your location information with health authorities
but not with the police and army who may find other uses for it.
There may be limits to technology as a solution to a pandemic.
Terrence Mckenna, CBC News, Toronto.