Everyone is now asked to work from home 100% which my team has been doing since Monday. This is an important pronouncement since a lot of employers are not doing it. Schools will be closed.
Essential services will still be open though. So groceries, hawkers and restaurants will still be open.
But then again, just like in previous instances when the PM would address the nation, queues in grocery lines are long.
Life in the past few weeks has been surreal. In Singapore, life still has a semblance of normalcy. Sure, there had been a lot of visible changes - public spaces with safe distancing markers, people wearing masks, less crowded streets, never-ending news about COVID-19 and its effects which we continuously consume, etc etc. But at the personal level, we could still go about our day to day activities. The government has done a good job in cushioning the effects of the crisis. I feel like we are in a bubble and we could choose to do so should we opt to. We wake up in the morning, have breakfast, watch TV, work, do our laundry, cook food, go to a well-stocked grocery if we need to, go to one of the 3 provision shops downstairs if we crave for an ice-cream cone or a cold drink - things that we do on an ordinary day. Things that we do during the pre-COVID days. There's no denying though, the precarity of the future causes a bit of worry. But it's so far off. It doesn't have a massive effect on us yet. Compare that with the Philippines. It's been 19 days since the lockdown and the government is only starting to stubbornly do mass testing. It's the situation in the Philippines that causes me anxiety. It's the president's lack of plan and false display of bravado that triggers my anger. His gratitute to the orange country and his minion without any acknowledgement of the frontliners' harmful situation makes my blood boil. His senseless ramblings during his perpetually late press conferences make me regret watching him. The DOH's call for nurses to volunteer in exchange of a P500/day allowance and potential benefits should they die because of the virus coupled with an insulting "treat it as a vacation" ad is nausea-inducing. I have to force myself to take a break from Philippine news to keep my sanity.
However, today, Singapore joined the huge number of countries which took aggressive measures to delay the spread of the virus. I think that the planners and speechwriters made a very good move of not using the words lockdown and quarantine so as not to cause alarm yet the measures implemented shows the seriousness of the situation. It's deviation from the WHO advise about mask use is brave, same with it's use of the term safe-distancing instead of social distancing (which the WHO has already changed to physical distancing). And typical of Singaporean standard of efficiency, right after the PM Lee's speech was the announcement that reusable masks will be given to households. A few minutes after, the link where masks can be collected were issued. I'll miss this place when if and when we leave.
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| A comic-relief in this anxiety-filled time relating to how PM Lee would take a sip from this cup whenever he would switch from English to Malay to Mandarin and back to English |
We still have a long way to go. Vaccines are still on their early stages of clinical trials. We dont know what the future folds but knowing how the government works here provides a sense of calm. Also, the indomitable resilience of the human spirit gives hope.
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