And now, we have the Coronavirus - Covid-19.

If 2019 was challenging, 2020 is certainly unexpected.
My marriage ended in Q3 of 2019.
I picked myself up, dusted myself off and tried my best to get on with my life and with things.
Mostly, things went very well given the circumstances.

I was busy at work, I had the 3 cats to care for and love. I was functional. I had emotional and spiritual support in the form of family, friends and colleagues. I was being challenged at work, I had things to do to move on in my personal life so I didn't really have a lot of time to mope around and get depressed.

It took a while, but I formally sold the house to the ex- in mid March. In the 2 months before that, I  was viewing condos every weekend so that once I had sold our current home, that I would be ready to buy my own place. By 3rd week of March, I had offered and secured the condo that I wanted. 

In the background, before Chinese New Year, we had heard about an epidemic that was happening in China. In the beginning, the disease was called the Wuhan virus. It later was renamed Covid-19 or novel coronavirus 2019. At work, things suddenly turned for the worse due to the virus. China declared a shutdown in Wuhan. The Singapore government started on epidemic / pandemic measures in the workplace.

This brought back to mind SARs from 2003. People died in SARS. I knew 2 nurses who died in SARs. They were sisters and covid-19 became very real for me, very fast. The university that I was working in in 2003 had so much to do to develop business continuity plans and exigency measures in quick time. Every day, we would hear news about infections and deaths. The term super-spreader (we had a cluster from a church where many people died) and distancing measures suddenly became common. We needed to work differently. Our senior management in 2003 did not all have mobile phones. I remember some of them were literally forced to get mobile phones so that they were contactable.

We were also at the time mostly working on desktop computers as they were cheaper than laptops. Wifi was also not as good or as common then so people were mostly still "wired" to the internet physically. During and after SARs, the use of laptops and wifi exploded in the workplace and in my mind, this was the biggest permanent change that SARs caused for workplaces.

Back to covid-19... After CNY, it was full steam ahead. Every other evening, there will be some new measure, new update by the government that we needed to comply with that was announced. Work got busier and busier. Measures gradually got more stringent, until yesterday, finally, a "lockdown" was announced. Now, the government completely avoided the use of the term lockdown. Instead, they called it a "circuit breaker". In spirit and form however, it is a lockdown; and it will start on 7 April 2020.

In the meantime, the company's business was drastically impacted and leaders were consulting us on potential "cost-saving measures" and the options that they have to control costs. *sigh*

Out in the world, the coronavirus turned into a global pandemic. As I speak, more than a million people have been infected and the epicenter of the pandemic has moved from China to Italy, then Spain. Now, the epicenter of the outbreak is in New York City in the US.

2020, you have been interesting in a sense that even my church pastor is preaching eschatology... the end times.

So stay safe everyone,

Be Faithful
Be prepared
Overcome.