Covid-19 in the community

Yeah, I can remember when it, it was being bandied about that there was this, this, there was this Covid-19 and it was, it was in [country] and it was coming over. When we think we’ve, we’ve done this before. In all my years, we had the swine flu and we had all this. And I think, in the beginning, none of us thought it was gonna be like this. We didn’t really take it serious. ‘Cos we, we’ve been through this before. There’s been other, there’s been other times when they said, “oooh you’re gonna have swine flu.” I can remember we all had the special masks then, years ago and we all had to have the swine flu injections, and this is you know, gonna have this and remember we were all a bit, all of us, I think, doctors all of us. It’ll come to nothing. And then like you started to sort of get closer and people started to go down and then there who were people dying and you started to see more stuff on the TV. And then, it sort of just hit us, really then. I, to be honest, I think we were all thinking uh, this might be happening here, something might be happening. And all of a sudden then, it was, you need to stop people coming in. Don’t let anybody in. You know, respiratory, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta wear PPE. Obviously, in the beginning, it was a nightmare ‘cos we didn’t have PPE in the beginning. We were struggling.

And when I came in to work, I remember coming back that first day and thinking, 'OK, it's not terrible.' And our ward of about forty eight patients or so, there were maybe eight cases of Covid, but eight cases of a single diagnosis is incredibly... well it doesn't happen; maybe bog standard pneumonia and that's it, but even then in Intensive Care like ours that's very unusual. And over the course of the subsequent weeks... or in subsequent week, that number just increased and increased and increased; within two weeks suddenly everyone's Covid; every patient had coronavirus.

At that time we did not know much, and that it would become so massive. Everyone used to say that it is like normal flu virus, like many other such viruses, that has come. In the past well, many things came, came and went away. Like, at the start we took it lightly, right? And expected it would not be very harmful. It will come…We thought science is so advanced. It will do something or another and then it will go away. But then after March when lockdown started, people were going in high numbers You know, the deaths, then we got worried that this is just not like normal flu but there is something is wrong, somewhere.

I remember there was a distinct sense of panic in the house when it was like, so and so’s aunties bird’s cousin has said that they work with someone who works in blah, blah, blah, and they said that they’re going to close the border tomorrow, do you know what I mean? It was that kind of thing. No one knew what was going on, all of my housemates but one lived in England, so they were worried that they were going to get stuck in Wales. One of my housemates is from India, she was worried about how to get home and it ended up into a last minute like, “I’ve just booked a flight and I’m going,” type thing. No one knew whether we’d be able to come home. I remember it was my, it’s my friend’s birthday the 28th March, 29thMarch oh gosh, she’ll shout at me if I don’t remember but, the end of March, and it became clear that we wouldn’t be able to have like a party like we would normally do, so we went to the SU and had like one last night out, and me and my other friend were getting a little bit nervous about going, because it was like that unknown of, “Oh I’ve heard that so and so has tested positive in Cardiff, and it was in, still in the stages of like, one or two like the first positive cases in the uni or in the city or in Wales even. And we were like “Oh gosh, like can you imagine if we went to the SU and then we ended up getting it and we’d have to stay here for another two weeks plus”. So, it was very much about like, worries about being trapped I think, worries about the restriction of freedom, the kind of unknown quantity of this virus. Didn’t know the affects it was going to have on us, didn’t know how it was going to play out in the future with coming back to uni, all kinds of stuff like that.

So, I’m not exactly sure when I was first aware of it but I’m going to guess around, well, when whenever it started hitting the mainstream news, I suppose so late January, early February maybe, so probably February more. As I am a full-time professional tourist guide, so I do all sorts of tours for all sorts of people and I do remember on one tour, I think late February, it started to become a thing in Italy and I remember a lot of speculation. Some people were saying, “Oh it will be good because all the Italian tours will be rebooking here instead.” So that sounded yeah, whatever, sounded potentially, you know, on a very personal level, beneficial but nobody really knew. But there was a lot of speculation as well about how things were going to get closed down. I remember having a fear that they might shut.

Yeah I think it was around January or so when people started to say that, yeah there’s a new disease in town so to speak and people who had been like I’m Swedish so I know that people who had been in Italy on a skiing trip they all brought back Covid and, you know, it wasn’t like they were dying or anything so I thought okay, okay it’s just a flu or, or something similar. But then everything got so much more dramatic especially here in England there’s so many more people here so and very good coverage of course, the media went crazy and were you know loving the situation even though it was so horrible it was just oh a party in, on the radio and television, newspapers, magazines, everywhere it wasn’t, you know, it was almost like you know, happy days for the media and that disgusted me slightly because, you know, they make a bigger thing out of something that might not be so big and with that they also frightened a lot of people and especially older people and vulnerable so I was pretty disgusted by the whole thing so that’s how I felt.

Well, when we first heard of the pandemic from China, Wuhan, it was explosion all over the world and it does not help being an Asian person, especially even though you are not from China. You are from Malaysia, as I told you I am a Malaysian, and how it affects the South East Asian community is because of the labelling because, as you can see on television, the media, where Donald Trump says, “Oh, the Chinese virus.” You know, and this affect a lot of people, which is South East Asian, because some people, they can’t tell between a Korean, Malaysian, Chinese, Indonesian, Filipinos, Vietnamese. To some people, all of us looks the same to be Chinese. So this has affected when comes to daily life because I have experienced two xenophobic attacks before I fell ill in April. And one of them was when I was coming up from shopping and this man just walk up to me and say, “Hey, you know you Asian virus. You should not be here. You people are barbaric. You eat bats. You eat dogs.” And I said, “I’m not going to engage with you because please leave me alone.” And he came right in front my face like that, so close, so close that I can feel his breath and I just say, “Sir, just leave me alone.” And, basically, I just took a dash but he kept following me and I, basically, just ran for my life because no matter how big a man is, you will feel the power is stronger than you I am not in a position to challenge him because I am a woman and I live alone. I don’t have many friends nearby in England and most of my friends are living up in Chester, in Wales and that is not helpful. So the second time was when I finished my shift, I was back then working in a mental health rehabilitation centre. I just finished a twelve and a half hour shift supporting person with mental illness and, on my way home, I was sitting in front carriage and this man came up to me and he, basically, he said, “You are not allowed in here. You have to get off the train.” I was shocked because I had done nothing. “You need to get off. You cannot be in the same train with me.” And, luckily, another gentleman was just sitting the opposite side from me and he came up and said, “Sir, you’ve got to move back. You’ve got to leave her alone.”

I think when I first heard about Covid or and Coronaviruses as I think it was first sort of, the terminology first used in the media, I just, I didn’t dismiss it but I just thought, ‘Oh it’s..’ and I know something like SARS or MERS, they were serious but they were quite regionalised and didn’t, you know, spread to a worldwide pandemic so I just thought it was a news item that would sort of die away and so on and then when things started, not hotting up a bit politically or whatever but my birthday’s on the 17th March so I, I was going out for a meal for my birthday for lunch and I asked my sister and my brother-in-law if they’d like to come and my sister who had had an operation on her heart at the end of the previous year, 2019 and has had a bad experience. She’s become sort of quite, don’t know what the word is, not paranoid but she’s become a bit very careful. So, she said that she decided that they, they decided they wouldn’t come and then of course on the Monday, the following Monday, which I think was the 20, I can’t remember the 26th or the 27^th or something that’s when lockdown was announced.

Well, obviously, being in the NHS, you get emails, you know, with updates on likely infections and things and it was in the press, wasn’t it. Especially with cruise ships and things and the way that it was spreading through China, and I mean they had had these breakthrough, breakouts in Italy and ski resort and various places so there was a fair bit of it in the news. And, obviously, these cruise ships being stuck so, you know, because we were going on a cruise, you know, that was obviously something you’d consider but, you know, it was either go or lose your money [laughs]. And you know, we did our risk assessment and thought, you know, in the Caribbean they didn’t seem to have Covid there but, obviously, there were other cruise ships there and maybe people from other countries had taken it there and I don’t know. I mean I heard to I think it was while we were away that it was on the news that there was a couple of cruise ships in the Caribbean that had been refused entry to islands that they’d had a breakout of Covid on the ship. But that wasn’t one of our, you know, wasn’t our ship but two others but whether we’d gone into the same port, I don’t know. Maybe at the same time or different time but, you know, if it spread that way, who knows?

Basically, I kind of heard of something back in January, February time. Didn’t really pay much attention to it because it was happening on the other side of the world. I don’t really watch the news much, to be honest, because I’m always busy with little ones and when I if I do watch, I watch sort of local stuff that’s going to affect my day to day. So it’s not like I didn’t care, I just didn’t know enough about it so I wasn’t going out of my way to follow the story but that was also the time I found out I was pregnant with our third baby. So, when it started spreading and it started becoming, people started talking about it more, I wasn’t still quite sure what it was and that’s when I started looking into it because people were coming to the UK and they were talking about a virus that’s not just like the flu, it’s different and it’s worse. The effect it was having, the fact that places shut down in China and airports, people were talking about closing borders and I was thinking, “What’s going on?”

It was 17th March 2019, and it was nearly Iranian New Year. That day a friend of mine said, “So sorry from this day, today we can’t meet all your family, we should go to other, my house.” I said, “Why what’s happened? “It’s pandemic. The Covid goes up and lots of people die because of Covid.” I said, “What’s Covid?” he said, “Oh it’s a new virus. Nobody knows about this virus but lots of doctor and nurse study and work hard for-, knows about this virus but unfortunately lots of people died of because of this virus so we should stay at home, don’t go out, never, because our government have decided to lockdown.” And I said, “I haven’t heard of this word ‘lockdown’, what’s lockdown?” and he said, “Okay just stay at home, don’t go out.”