An Halloween tale

Actually, I have a good Covid-19 Halloween tale to tell but I was too lazy to write about it yesterday. But here I am today, all ready to put pen down on paper to recount my ordeal of living through some self-inflicted ordeal in the last two weeks or so. As you know, I was in Taiping just a day before the town was declared a red zone by the Health authorities, although I never did get to know where in Taiping the infections were detected. Could have been far away, or it could have been on the same road that I was moving about on.

Anyway, that was on the 15th of October. A week later on the 24th, I met up in George Town with an ex-colleague from my banking days. We had an assignment: him taking close-up photographs of some souvenir items. For almost three hours, we had interacted within six feet of one another. We had then agreed to meet up again on the 29th to complete the session.

On the 28th afternoon, he telephoned me to say that the session had to be postponed. Reason was because he had been called by the Health authorities through contact tracing to present himself for medical investigation. The day before our initial meet-up, he was having a departmental lunch with his colleagues at the TGIF restaurant in Queensbay Mall, Penang, and the news had spread like wild fire that someone infected with Covid-19 had dined there as well on the 23rd.

You can imagine the alarm that spread within my family. If he had been exposed to the virus, here I was in a difficult position. I felt rather uncomfortable. If he was infected, the three hours I spent with him could be dangerous too. The only factor in my favour was that I was wearing a mask throughout the whole time and that would have cut down the odds a lot.

It was a waiting game for him to keep me informed of further developments but I was prepared to go into self-isolation should the need arose. Not only me but my wife too. Meanwhile, my son had been instructed not to return home until the coast was clear. I had an appointment on Saturday, which I had to postpone to later.

Finally, i received a call from my ex-colleague on the 29th afternoon. The Health authorities had given him the all-clear. His was at a departmental lunch at the TGIF restaurant while the infected person had ate there in the evening. Their paths had not crossed at all. So he was clear, and so was I. Big sigh of relief.

But this close shave brings a thought to me. One cannot be too careful with our movements nowadays. Everywhere looks like a place for a potential booby trap. Every person you meet is a potential source of infection because you can never know where he has been or whom he has been in contact with. The onus is on everyone of us to take care of ourselves as best as we can. 

Wear a face mask, practice social distancing, wash your hands often, discard your soiled clothes every time you return from an extended trip outside your home. Most importantly, make use of the MySejahtera app on your mobile to record your every movement and facilitate contact tracing.