Posts for 2025

Just last month, I made contact with something that had well and truly left behind: COVID-19. It began with a mild burning sensation behind the eyes, feeling chilly and an ache in the bones. A day or so later, the sore throat came, along with the phlegm and snot. It did not even occur to me to test for COVID-19 until the third day, and even then I had to test twice!


It was relatively mild; not like how it had been the first time the world noticed COVID-19's ugly spiked head. Singapore and some parts of Southeast Asia have been experiencing a resurgence of COVID-19 cases. I just happened to get caught up in it.

This little episode inspired me to recall the turmoil back then, and how the world, Singapore in particular, survived the dark years of the pandemic.

How It Began

The tail end of 2019 marked a significant chapter in human history, a period which many of us lived through in trepidation. COVID-19 made its presence felt as governments around the world imposed strict, sometimes draconian, safety measures on their citizens.

Thus, unless one was living on a desert island somewhere in the middle of the ocean, the effects of COVID-19's presence was felt, at least indirectly, if not on a far more lethal level. Singapore was no exception. Even now in 2025, with the traumatic experiences of that chapter behind us, COVID-19 remains a relevant talking point; if not as a real and present danger to life and well-being, as a cautionary tale.


How did we survive this? Honestly, the answers vary from person to person. My COVID-19 experience as a Singaporean will differ in places from the rest of the world. My experiences as a software developer may differ from other Singaporeans. Therefore, I can speak only for myself, and perhaps other Singaporean software developers.

2019 to early 2020: COVID-19 creeps up on the world

When the Coronavirus was first announced in China, self-preservation wasn't the first thing on my mind. After all, the world had dealt with SARS and MERS, and Singapore had barely been touched before the fuss died down.

No, my concern was as a husband. My newly-wedded wife was in China at the time, and she was stuck in a strict lockdown.

Soon, COVID-19 began making its presence felt in Singapore, which had inevitability written all over it. After all, Singapore is an international hub where foreigners land hourly, even if just for transit purposes. Cases began spreading through the island.At first, Government handled it well. Perhaps taking our safety for granted, people were still disregarding Government advisories on group gatherings, and not being altogether truthful when they caught COVID-19 and had to be questioned on their activities.

All I could really do at this point, was watch the news and avoid going out too much. Honestly, as a guy who only really hung out at a very limited number of places, this just didn't represent any great hardship for me. I was perfectly content to stay home and watch YouTube content, write my code, and work on my numerous side-projects.

Up to this point, gantries had been set up at office buildings. We all had to have our temperatures checked, and logged. Mask mandates were on. Groups of larger than five, were discouraged.

There was something in the air (other than the obvious!), a vibe of dread mixed with optimism. Things were at s stage where it could get better, or get a whole lot worse. And even if things got better for Singapore, as connected as we were to the rest of the world, it would not do us much good.

Mid-2020: DORSCONs

Singaporeans watched as the case count crept higher despite the best efforts of the COVID Task Force. And soon, Singapore moved to DORSCON Orange.

Things started escalating further with a work-from-home order for non-sessential personnel. As software developers, this described our jobs perfectly. Our jobs were important, but also perfect for remote work. Furthermore, as we were doing work for the Economic Development Board (i.e, doing work for the Singapore Government) and the Singapore Government needed to lead by example, the software developer team would be relegated to our own homes, with office equipment. Meetings would be held via video call.

Many of my colleagues liked the idea of working from home. My prior experience with it wasn't so great; however, at that time, I had already secured a new job and was counting down the days.

Around this time was when an alarming percentage of the population began to go full retard lose their collective marbles. There were people crowding the supermarkets for one last supply buying spree. The most popular item? Toilet paper. I shit you not. Pun fully intended.


People were finding all sorts of excuses to go out and hang out, never mind that this was what got us into this mess in the first place. Queues for things like bubble tea and haircuts became the in-thing as businesses were given a deadline to temporarily shut down. Anti-foreigner sentiment was at an all-time high, despite the fact that Singapore was largely built on the backs of foreign worker labor. For real, at this point I was starting to wonder if Singaporeans had only recently become this stupid. Then again, the world had never encountered anything on this scale; perhaps I could have extended a little understanding.

In the larger picture, it wasn't exactly only Singaporeans that were reacting due to panic. Small consolation there, but for a while it did seem like the world had gone mad and there was no going back.

There was no end in sight once the restrictions took hold. Gantries were now a fact of life in all major air-conditioned buildings such as shopping malls, not just office buildings. Contact tracing tokens were issued to everyone on the island, where they were used against scanners built into the gantries. Even individual shops (and taxis!) had QR codes for customers to scan in and out when they were done! This only made me more determined not to go out.

Sporting facilities such as swimming complexes were off-limits. That put a huge crimp in my workout schedule, and now I was forced to actually go out and run instead of swim. Put some stress on these aging knees.

Software development, as an industry, had already been constantly hiring up to then; now it positively erupted as big tech began recruiting with an aggression not previously seen. It appeared that since remote work was now a thing, hiring software developers had just become easier. And with no end in sight of remote work, more software products were being pushed that would ride this wave.

Some thoughts

Some say there are opportunities within a crisis. I've also heard people claim that the Chinese words for "danger" and "opportunity" are the same... and unsurprisingly, the people peddling this garbage don't actually know any Chinese.

But yes, the general principle stands. There were lessons to be learned in the midst of a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

The necessity of limiting physical contact as much as possible meant that Government agencies had to modernize their services, updating them to match the Internet age. Now instead of having to show up in-person to apply for new passports, the ICA implemented a process where the documents could be mailed to addresses instead. Instead of a similarly clunky process in CPF nomination, for example, where the supplicant had to fill up a paper form and have two people physically present to witness, now applicants and their witnesses can log on to the CPF portal to participate in the processes.


Companies learned to cope with remote working, once considered unthinkable. Grudgingly, almost certainly, but they did it. And even though many wasted precious little time reverting to in-office work years later, the fact remains that they did it, and it worked.

What I'm trying to say is that COVID-19 forced us to up our game on many levels. We ventured out of our comfort zones. Instead of adopting the good old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" cop-out, we came to terms with the fact that during COVID-19, a lot of it was, in fact, broken and needed to be fixed. Pronto.

A look at the latter half of 2020 and the aftermath.

Singapore, indeed the entire world, continued grappling with COVID-19 well into the latter half of 2020. By that point, there was a pervasive sense of resignation - that this was to be our new normal. Up to this point, cases in Singapore had remained at a manageable number. The lockdowns had lasted for a while - and mark this well, even though lockdowns were observed in various ways internationally, they were still being observed in some form or other.


This was also the year where Singapore held her General Elections during the pandemic. I remember being particularly infuriated by politicians taking the opportunity to grandstand and politicize despite the fact that lives and livelihoods were at stake. That level of selfishness boggled the mind.

Singapore was being lauded by the international community for the way she had handled the pandemic thus far. But I took little pride in it. This was a highly fluid situation, and all that could be flipped on its head in the course of twenty-four hours.

All this was not sustainable. Our economy, reliant on remaining open and accessible to the rest of the world, suffered. Jobs were lost. Hiring was slow except for certain sectors, such as healthcare (big surprise there), tech and logistics.

I, too, lost my job in the month of September. By then, I had known of so many people who had suffered a similar fate, that I thought nothing of it. Even when advised by various people to apply for grants meted out to the unemployed during the pandemic, I consistently declined. Compared to people who had been jobless for months, my own situation did not seem so dire. I would much prefer Government money to go towards more deserving cases. For starters, I actually had money in the bank from years of not spending much. Further, I was from the tech industry. It was booming. With the advent of remote work, it seemed like tech firms could not get enough of developers. I predicted that by the time I got off my ass to fill out the form, I would have landed another job.

And I was proven right - within two weeks of losing my job, I was hired. This was less a testament to my value as an employee, then to the nature of my industry.

2021: Optimistically easing up.

Singapore plodded on, and mandated vaccination jabs while slowly opening up. This caused quite a bit of consternation among the general populace, though older folks were generally happy to trust the Government's direction on this. I had my own reasons for being willing to vaccinate, which I'll get into later.

Professionally, I was working from home the majority of the time. I had settled down into my work and even managed to juggle school on top of it. I was living with the restrictions just fine because they didn't interfere with my lifestyle... much.

But there was one problem - it was getting lonely. Not being much of an extrovert, social distancing was actually a good thing as far as I was concerned. Until it wasn't. As the months wore on, I began to discover that anti-social as I was, even I had my limits.


For that, there was the Clubhouse app. It was novel at the time; a way to connect with random strangers in the rest of the world, get updates and take solace in knowing we weren't alone in our suffering. Of course, like all Social Media, it went to shit pretty quickly because when human beings are involved, toxic behaviors are always par for the course.

That said, Clubhouse did a lot for me. I made friends and eventually visited them. Some of them came over to Singapore to visit, in turn. Listening to real-time conversations was also a good way to familiarize myself with foreign languages. It got me comfortable with public speaking, at the very least. I spent countless nights leaving it on in the background throughout. Sometimes there would be endless heat - shouting matches, drama, that kind of thing - and I would literally sleep through it all, like a baby. In the absence of my wife, this felt like I was in a room full of people.

And then the Missus came back from China, where she had been stuck for the past year. This coincided with the Singapore Government's vaccine mandate, and some of the rules were confusing where foreigners were concerned. I don't really have a problem with the vaccine mandates, but communication was often unclear, contradictory and generally inadequate. Really not what I've come to expect from the civil sector, but these were extraordinary times, I guess.

She caught COVID-19 a few months later, and to my everlasting perplexity, I didn't catch so much as a sniffle despite lying beside her every night for a week. I wasn't dumb enough to believe that I had any sort of superhuman immunity or something; this was just one of those inexplicable things.

2022: Catching COVID-19

I did catch the virus about a year later. My wife had caught it a second time, and this time my luck ran out. It should have been the Omicron variant by then. COVID-19, at this time, was nowhere as deadly as it had been when it first surfaced, and we survived it with nothing more severe than a running nose.

Was it because we were vaccinated by then? That may have played a part, sure.


Many people were quick to point out that vaccines aren't a hundred percent effective because people can still catch the disease after being vaccinated. Well of course vaccines aren't a hundred percent effective - nothing ever is. Vaccines weren't meant to prevent people from catching the coronavirus - they were meant to help train the body to fight it, and lower the chances of dying painfully from it.

I could say a lot more, but again, perhaps that's best left for later.

More Thoughts

It may be an oversimplification to say that Singapore emerged relatively unscathed due to good governance. I give our Government their due, certainly. It could not have been easy running a country during such trying times.

Plenty of people worried about dying. Some worried about not dying (at least, not right away) and instead suffering till their last rasping breath. I pretty much accepted this was out of my (frequently-washed) hands and focused on what I could control.

Job losses and the suffering economy were next on the list of the average Singaporean's worries. The Food and Beverage industry seemed to be among the hardest hit (though Food Delivery boomed), as restaurants started encountering Government-mandated limits on restaurant capacity. Many closed down. I made it a point to buy from hawkers as often as I could. It gave me an excuse to go out, and at the same time hopefully contribute to their dwindling coffers.

Socially, life was a mixed bag. I was mostly hanging out with my tenants but nobody else. My WhatsApp chats were abuzz with activity and plenty of quarrels erupted. With those who were spreading unhelpful vibes and bad advice, I was particularly savage. Normally I'm a live-and-let-live kind of guy, but I needed an outlet and idiots were an irresistable target.


You see, there were plenty of overnight experts claiming that Government directives such as mask mandates, safe distancing and vaccinations, did not work because despite their existence, people were still catching the virus. The sheer stupidity of statements like these were mind-boggling. Policies aren't like software - they don't work magically on the flip of a switch and results are not a hundred percent guaranteed. Even in the field of medicine, where there are outliers to everything, nothing is absolute. Expecting the number of cases to drop to zero overnight just because the majority of people started wearing masks, was idiocy on a mind-boggling scale.

Sure, the science may not have been entirely correct. But that's always been the nature of science - the knowledge is never a hundred percent. How do people complete a basic education and yet fail to understand this? Bizarre.

To today.

The latter half of 2022 was when the masks came off. In August, it was announced that masking up was no longer mandatory except in medical facilities and food preparation, and on public transport.

It seemed like a small thing, but wow, the sensation of wind on my face after years of this shit was... incredible.

By February of 2024, masks were no longer required on public transport. There was a real sense that this was the last remnants of COVID-19 restrictions being lifted.


Cinemas were allowed to open to full capacity. Swimming complexes and gyms no longer required users to go through a daily booking process, with penalties for no-shows. People tossed their contact tracing tokens. I kept mine around because it was cute.

Large gatherings were allowed again. With that, employers began pushing for a return to office. People started travelling again - ticket prices stopped being ridiculously expensive.

It felt like Singapore, after years of slumber, was starting to wake up once more.

2024 to now

COVID-19 didn't go away. However, it rapidly began to feel like it had become yesterday's news. COVID-19 was no longer the extinction event it had once threatened to be.

As a nation, we took cautious steps on the road to recovery. Some things were never quite the same again. Some businesses folded even after restrictions were lifted. Professionals pivoted to different careers. There was a limit, after all, to how much Government intervention could accomplish.
And for some reason - perhaps this was just my imagination - the issue of mental health seemed to come to the forefront of societal consciousness.  Either the causes of depression predated COVID-19 and this was merely exacerbated due to social distancing and lockdowns, or the long-term effects of having contracted COVID-19 had some effect on brain chemistry.
Because it wasn't just the medical effects of COVID-19. The damage dealt to the economy was not inconsiderable.

Even now, big tech is in the process of laying off all the tech people they snapped up during the dark years of COVID-19. That bubble has burst. It seems especially bad in Silicon Valley, though Singapore is affected as well due to the simple fact that big tech also has offices in Singapore.

As a software developer, I am just profoundly glad that I never hopped on to that gravy train. Sometimes being completely mediocre is a blessing.

Final thoughts

I've said earlier that Singaporeans generally seemed to be becoming alarmingly stupid during the pandemic. Upon further reflection, the truth may have been far worse.

You see, Singaporeans are generally well-educated. We can speak and even write in a variety of languages. We are capable of rational thought. Therefore I find it hard to believe that the average Singaporean would have difficulty understanding the concepts I outlined earlier. No, what Singaporeans suffer from isn't stupidity; rather, it is Main Character Syndrome. The inability to grasp that there are things bigger than them, and that not everything is about them. The inability to get over themselves.

However, for good or ill, this was what the Singapore Government had to work with. It wasn't all bad. Some of us stepped up - some in small ways like myself, some in more substantive ways. We responded as a society, and while there might have been plenty of grumbling as we did it, it is part and parcel of the Singapore DNA. These were heartening signs in what looked like a sea of negativity. On my part, the crists had awakened some kind of social conscience within myself. I wasn't exactly rushing out to the frontlines to offer my aid. I didn't become a Safe Distancing Ambassador or help deliver supplies. I didn't help swab thousands of people a day to test for COVID-19. And I certainly did not participate in helping to write new and interesting software that could help Singapore tide over this crisis. That all said, I gained a new appreciation for how well-run Singapore generally is, and did my small part as a citizen.
I spared a few thoughts for my immediate community rather than focus on my own survival. Any money that the Singapore Government disbursed to citizens as aid during this period, I promptly donated to charity. I took pains to patronize small stores and hawkers, as these were the most vulnerable to changes in the economy.

And, despite the fact that I didn't know for sure that vaccination jabs were absolutely safe, I took them.

What does that have to do with a social conscience? You see, Singapore is in a unique situation. The size of this country, with its lack of manpower and natural resources, means that we must open our borders to foreign investment in order to survive. Had we insisted on staying closed, Singapore would have sunk just as surely as if all of us had been overrun by the coronavirus. Sure, we would have sunk slower, but we would have sunk nonetheless. Singapore required at least eighty percent of her citizens to be vaccinated before we could open our borders. There was a chance I could die if I accepted the jab. I took that chance. I will never be great. I'll never be a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs. I will never cure cancer, create art that will transcend generations, or otherwise achieve anything monumental. But whatever small thing I could do for my country, I did. The jab was never about saving my statistically insignificant life. At the risk of sounding cliche, it was for the greater good. I do value my life... I'm just not vain enough to think it's more important than the millions of livelihoods at stake.

Epilogue

It's 2025. COVID-19 is a distant memory, but not so distant that the turmoil has not left its mark. Now and again, we see some remnant of the measures that were in place during the pandemic. The posters. The tracing tokens. Hand sanitizer. Abandoned gantries.


It's recent enough that any talk of a possible pandemic is instantly compared to COVID-19. Not the Spanish Flu. Not the Red Death, or the Bubonic Plague.

The world seems to have recovered, but the scars run deep.