The Dark Years of COVID-19: A Software Developer's Perspective (Part 2/3)

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.

A election during
COVID-19.

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.

Isolation.

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.

Taking the jab.

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.

Masks were
controversial.

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.

 

Next

To today.