We are currently facing a global epidemic. More than 1.4 million people have suffered and the numbers are still rising. Singapore has officially started lockdown 2 days ago (on Tuesday 7th April). I feel Singapore was very hesitant to start the lockdown because of how dependent their economy is on services. The Singaporean lifestyle is very consumer-based and requires people to be shopping and working. When the first case came to Singapore months ago the government didn’t make much of an effort to control it and relied solely on temperature screenings. As the cases increased they left casinos and theme parks open. I can, however, understand why the government was very slow. Many Singaporean citizens who work in low paying jobs like hawker centres or other retail industries rely on their wages to survive in this expensive countries, some of them live in small populated HDB’s putting them at risk of catching and spreading the virus. I think being on Lockdown is going to be especially hard for them because some of them rely on their weekly income for basic supplies. I think the government really struggled with the trade-off between financial struggle and health struggles. I think Singapore can’t afford to be complacent with their rules because once the virus starts spreading it is likely going to spread very quickly. We are starting to see that happen, at this time there are 1,623 cases. I feel like the after-effects of this virus is going so much worse than SARS as the total SARS cases got to 238 with only 33 deaths. We have surpassed the cases but not the deaths. I feel like ex-pats like myself are lucky in the sense that many of our parents have the ability to work from home and the fact that more of us live in private condominiums which are arguably safer as they are less populated.