It's hard to recall when I first became aware of coronavirus and started to experience it's impact. I think it was around mid January 2020. Looking online at Singapore's main newspaper; The Straits Times, one of their headlines on January 15th was-
Gosh how wrong this was going to turn out to be.
Of course we didn't call it Covid-19 or Coronavirus then, it was commonly referred to as the Wuhan Virus. I know little about China and had never heard of Wuhan but came to learn that Wuhan is the capital city of Hubei province and the most populous city of Central China with a population of over 11 million.
But in mid January I was busy enjoying life in Singapore and not too concerned about what was happening in Wuhan. My sister, Nicki had recently come to live in Singapore for a few months whilst her husband was working here and Nicki and I were having fun helping Nicki settle in and exploring Singapore together. Our niece Marianne came to stay for a few days as she was on her way to Australia where she would be working for a few months. Nicki, Marianne and I visited Chinatown on 15th January to see how it was being decorated for the forthcoming Chinese New Year celebrations.
Saturday 25th January was the start of the Year of the Rat. Looking back through my phone's photo library I received this happy new year 'card' that day and it seemed really funny at the time. Lots of funny jokes and photos had started to circulate on social media. One I remember well was a photo of people wearing empty upturned water coolers on their heads in an attempt to avoid inhaling infected droplets - it seemed bizarre behviour
Things were now hotting up with coronavirus, and it was starting to spread around Asia. On 23rd January Wuhan declared it was "locking down", it meant they were shutting themselves off from the rest of the world and was an unfamiliar term that would soon become very familiar. On this same day the first case of an infected individual in Singapore was reported.
By 25th January China had over 1,200 cases and had recorded 41 deaths, this seemed shocking then but we had no idea as to how much more shocking the figures were to become.
The Chinese New Year celebrations in Singapore went ahead but seemed more muted than usual, even so the traditional practice of the whole family getting together on the first day of CNY was probably largely responsible for spreading the virus far and wide.
During January I had been very busy with preparing for my next trip to Siem Reap, where I would be volunteering again with the wonderful organisation Caring for Cambodia. The health screening trip was scheduled to commence on 3rd February and I was leading it this time, taking 6 volunteers out to screen over 1500 children for height, weight and vision.
The management team of Caring For Cambodia discussed whether the Health Screening trip should still go ahead and took advice from international senior medical officers. The risk assessment was done and the decision made that the trip would proceed and as well as the scheduled health screening we would pay special attention to passing on health education advice about the importance of hand washing, using hand sanitisers and good hygiene to encourage disease prevention.
It was another fantastically rewarding trip. It was very hard work with long, busy days and quite difficult screening conditions at times but the Cambodian team were as always wonderful and a pleasure to work with. On the last evening all the volunteers and the local CFC staff, had a celebratory meal together and I was very touched to be given a lovely token of appreciation by Ung Savy, CFC's Superintendent of Schools and Country Director
On my return to Singapore it felt like something had changed, people's anxiety was certainly building. The death toll in China was rising, locally events were being cancelled and companies started dropping out of the forthcoming Singapore Airshow.
Dorscon orange had last been activated during the N1N1 pandemic in 2009 even though there were no confirmed cases in Singapore.
At the end of January2020 the Singapore government created a public WhatsApp group and encouraged everyone to join it. It provides regular updates about the numbers of infected people, clarifies rumours, notifies of key government announcements and imparts health advice, including regular reminders to 'wash hands' and monitor one's health. It time it would also notify the number of patients in ICU and each new death. I joined the group and every day, in fact generally twice a day now, get up to date information.
In early February we were notified that the government was giving each household 4 masks and we should collect these from local community centre. The information at that time was that masks need only be worn by those who were unwell, in Asia it's quite usual to see people wearing masks but this number increased hugely over the next few weeks.
Reports of panic buying started circulating and many supermarkets shelves were emptying of rice, instant noodles, cleaning products, hand sanitiser and loo roll. In time this same panic buying was replicated in many other countries around the world and resulted in countless meme's and jokes, these all helped to lighten the mood but probably also unwittingly encouraged some people to stock up unnecessarily
On the 11th Feb, WHO announced the official name of this new strain of coronavirus- Covid-19. The name is an amalgamation of the words 'corona', 'virus' and 'disease' and 19 from the year 2019 when it was first identified. Looking online at this time there were more than 42,200 confirmed cases in China and the number of deaths had overtaken that of the Sars epidemic in 2002-03. The virus was spreading across the world, Japan had 161 cases (135 onboard a cruise ship), Germany 14 and Singapore had 45 cases.
But for us and most people life in Singapore was carrying on pretty much as normal with a few modifications such as having one's temperature checked on entering shopping malls, offices and public places. Hand sanitiser gel appeared on the gate to our condo and on each of the lift lobbies along with notices about how to avoid the Wuhan coronavirus.
At this time I was still volunteering at Riding for the Disabled twice a week, before entering the premises everyone had to have their temperature checked and fill in a declaration of health form and sign that they had not visited mainland China in the previous 14 days. Sadly, but sensibly, by 13th Feb all Thursday RDA sessions were cancelled, and only a short while later all other sessions were cancelled until further notice.
The weekend of 16th Feb we took the boat out and motored as close as the security restrictions allowed us, to the end of Changi airport to watch the flying display of the Singapore Airshow which had been able to proceed but with reduced exhibitors. The display was fantastic
We had some of our oldest friends staying with us, they were on their way to a 5 week holiday travelling around Australia, none of us had any idea how the brewing coronavirus chaos would impact on their return to the UK and our return to Singapore from India in a few weeks time. From the photo below it's clear that we didn't yet know about the importance of social distancing!
Around this time some secret plans I had been making also started to fall apart as the wretched virus took more control of our lives. Early in January Papa T and I had started planning for his BIG (60th ) birthday at the end of February. After some persuading Papa T agreed to a party. Unbeknown to Papa T I got in touch with several of his oldest friends & two of them had said they would fly over from the UK to surprise him. I couldn't wait to see his face when they suddenly appeared. Sadly the wretched virus put paid to the friends coming over and they both had to cancel their trips.
The party was however great fun, with many local friends and the big birthday was well and truly celebrated. The 'birthday cake' was a hand made pork pie! Again looking back we had no idea this would be the last get-together we could host for quite some time.
To celebrate Papa T's big birthday we had also booked a special holiday. I had spent months researching and planning a trip Rajasthan with the main focus on hopefully seeing tigers in the wild in Ranthambore National Park. Over the years we have been lucky enough to seen many wild animals in their natural environments, something we really enjoy doing. We have seen lions in Africa, Orang-utans in Borneo and Whale sharks in the Maldives, but we had not yet seen tigers.
By early March there were around 130 Covid cases in Singapore. All new cases were (and continue to be) rigorously investigated and any of their contacts traced. These cases were largely linked to known clusters at this time and Singapore seemed to be managing and containing the situation very well, indeed it was receiving praise for this both internationally and from WHO.
Papa T's company along with many other companies tested the possibility of split team working, so that one half of a work team worked from home one week whilst the other half worked in the office and then they all swopped the following week, that way if a team member became infected then only half the team would have to self quarantine. On 9th March Papa T commenced his first week of working from home. He converted the little study area in our apartment into his workspace and we started to learn what it would be like, living and working together 24/7. Although that week was meant to be a test we were not to know that by the time we came back from India this would become the 'new norm'.
We frequently discussed whether we should still be going on holiday to India and consulted many avenues for information. At this point there were few reported cases of the virus in India, so we decided to go ahead but realistically knew that our trip was 'under threat'. We were scheduled to leave Singapore on Friday 13th March.
On Thursday 12th, the morning before our hols, our emotional roller coaster ride took off. I put on the TV to see the early morning news, and was horrified to hear that India had just announced that all visas were being suspended as of 12.00 Greenwich Mean Time on Friday 13th from port of departure! On top of this the WHO that day declared the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic although we didn't hear that news until much later in the day.
Disbelief, disappointment and sadness washed over me, we wouldn't be able to go on holiday😭
Then Papa T pointed out that we were scheduled to fly at 16.00 Singapore time which was 08.00 GMT, so inside the cutoff point, we could go after all, hooray😀
A few hours later I received an email form the India travel agent that I had booked our trip with and he said they would sadly have to cancel our trip because of the visa cancellations, I felt disappointment again. 😞
I quickly replied pointing out the time of our flight was before the deadline and asked him to check. I was thrilled when he came back to me saying yes we were right and our trip could still go ahead, hooray again.😁
But I was feeling nervous, would we be allowed to fly and would India immigration actually let us in once we landed in Delhi and most of all was it sensible to go? I spent hours on the phone to our airline trying to get clarity. The flight was still scheduled to depart but no one seemed to be able to give an answer as to whether we would be allowed to enter India, one lovely phone operator said she would get in touch with India immigration and would call back to let us know but by nearly midnight we still hadn't heard. It was hard to sleep that night.😪
I was back on the phone by 6am but they hadn't yet had an answer. It felt silly starting to pack our suitcases and I mentally prepared myself that our holiday was off.
I could not believe it when I got a call back from the lovely phone operator that I spoken with the night before, at 10.30 saying immigration had finally confirmed that we would be allowed in to India! Absolute fantastic news and just in the nick of time, 3 hours later we were packed and in a taxi on our way to Changi airport😄
In brief we had a fantastic holiday ( full details and loads of photos to come in separate post ) but all the time it felt a bit like we were just keeping ahead of the curve. We were very lucky and saw the Taj Mahal with far fewer people than usual as the tourism industry was gradually shutting down. Two days later the Taj Mahal closed to all.
In Ranthambore we were amongst their few remaining guests at the wonderful tented Oberoi hotel and had an exceptional stay there, we saw lots of wildlife on the game drives and to our delight saw a leopard and two tigers. The morning we left Ranthambore we were informed that the National Park had that day been closed to visitors, we again counted our good fortune that we had managed to visit it in the nick of time .
We drove on to Jaipur, and had a short day looking around the Pink City and saw the outside of the Amber Palace but by now all monuments across India had been closed and we started to feel a growing sense of our luck running out.
That evening Papa T received an email stating that if we did not return to Singapore before midnight on Friday 20th we would be issued a Stay Home Notice, which would mean having to stay in our apartment for 14 days on our return, no going out not even for food shopping and we would not be able to see anyone. We were booked to return on Sunday 22nd!
We decided we had to abandon the rest of our trip and try to return asap but had no luck changing our flights online and could not get through to the airline by phone that night, I guess there were an awful lot of people trying to beat the curfew like us. The coronavirus chaos had well and truly caught up with us. Very early the following morning we got through and managed to get 2 tickets on a flight leaving Delhi at 9.30 pm that night.
Praveeen, our driver for the last week, was a little surprised when he arrived at our hotel that morning expecting to take us to Jaipur airport for our onward flight to Udaipur, only for us to ask him if we could drive back with him to Delhi? He kindly agreed and 6 hours later dropped us off at Delhi airport where we began the long wait until our flight back home.
Looking back this seemed to be another one of those turning points in time, life was to be quite different when we arrived back in Singapore
