On May 31, 2003, Singapore was declared SARS-free by the World Health Organization. CNA explores how the virus impacted those on the frontline and eventually shaped Singapore's COVID-19 response.
SINGAPORE: Perched on the couch and sandwiched between her two daughters, Koh Woon Puay pulls out her old family albums and starts flipping the pages.
Her husband, whom she had not seen in a month, had taken time off work to go on a two-week vacation with her before they returned to Singapore together. In March, WHO issued a global alert for outbreaks of"a severe form of atypical pneumonia" in Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Guangdong province in China. The outbreak later spread to two other hospitals - Singapore General Hospital and National University Hospital.
In comparison, COVID-19 - which has infected more than 766 million people worldwide and killed nearly 7 million as of May 24 according to WHO - has a fatality rate of about 0.9 per cent."More patients were getting infected with SARS and infecting healthcare workers. So doctors and nurses had to be quarantined, meaning the hospital was becoming increasingly short-staffed," said Dr Koh.
"I just told him to be very, very careful and he assured me that he would be very careful because he would not put our family, especially our two young daughters, at risk," she added. "She had been admitted to the hospital and had been diagnosed with atypical pneumonia," recalled Ms Lim, who is now a senior nurse clinician at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases .
Ms Lim dons personal protective gear before entering a patient's room in the ICU, a practice that only started after the SARS outbreak in 2003. "We had some early warnings from our colleagues in Hong Kong who said something was going on there and to please watch out for it," she recalled. On Mar 12, 2003, the World Health Organization issued a global alert for a severe form of pneumonia of unknown origin in persons from China, Vietnam and Hong Kong - which was later named SARS.
"It was very lonely," she said."I would talk to my family on the phone and my father did say that if it was too much, I could just go home," she said."But I told him that I was okay, it's just that I missed the family.Numerous stories of sacrifice such as this were what made SARS such a defining moment, said Dr Ang.
"It was not an easy thing to happen. It would have been understandable if people were scared and decided to quit or resign but the majority of people didn't," she added proudly.IN THE LINE OF DUTY "Later, my domestic helper told me that he had waved goodbye to my two young daughters who were aged one and three at the time. That was the last time my two daughters ever saw their father," she said."We would talk on the phone and he would update me on how he was feeling, also trying to put my mind at ease," she said, adding that his symptoms had not been typical of SARS.
With tears rolling down her cheeks, she shared what the doctors had told her about her husband's final moments. Meanwhile, Singapore had more than 260 cases and already implemented border restrictions for some countries in Europe and Asia, which had very high numbers of cases, as well as social distancing measures.
But despite all the uncertainty and having once lost someone to a virus, the family was determined not to live in fear. She ended up staying in Singapore for nearly one-and-a-half years, doing her university studies remotely. "By then, we had all taken our COVID-19 vaccinations and booster shots, so we weren't that worried," said Dr Koh."It was just like a flu."While SARS was a painful chapter for many, the lessons learnt proved to be crucial in preparing for subsequent infectious disease outbreaks including COVID-19.
The deployment of contact tracing tools such as TraceTogether and diagnostic tests during COVID-19 also changed the game, said experts. "There was no diagnostic test, no polymerase chain reaction , nothing. And that was the dangerous part."
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