Day 21 of Singapore's COVID-19 Circuit Breaker - Staying Home Singing "Home"

It is 21 days into Singapore's pseudo-lockdown or what our government coined as circuit breaker. Things are starting to stabilize. The daily case numbers are decreasing from the 4 digit daily case increase to 3 digit increases for the past 4 days (we have 799 new cases reported today which is not shown in the chart below). This is an encouraging sign.

Source

---

Staying home singing "Home"

It was night time 2 days ago and I was hosting an online game party with my friends over Zoom at about 8pm. I started to hear some cheering and singing outside my window. People were standing near their windows and singing a song. Baffled, I then asked my friends what was going on. So apparently, there was an initiative on mainstream social media (e.g. Facebook) to coordinate and get people to sing a song together at 8pm on 25th May, Singapore time. Here is a video of what happened,

I thought it was a really nice gesture and initiative to show support and solidarity in this times of crisis. By the way, the title of the song is called "Home". Too bad I am the oddball who doesn't use mainstream social media and did not know about it before the event 😅. Anyway, here is how the song is supposed to sound like.

This is a pretty old song which we usually sing on Singapore's National day, 9th August. This song brings back a lot of my memory as it was released 22 years ago when I was still in secondary school. I still remember that we had to practice this song for National day that year. Don't get me wrong, it is a nice song. But a teenage me back then just didn't like it when forced to do things that I found meaningless 😝. Now everyone is asked to stay at home, which brings a different meaning to this song.

---

A tale of 2 cities

I always like to look at some alternative statistics to gain more insights about things. So, to see how effective our circuit breaker is, we can take a look at TomTom's traffic statistics.

Source

As you can see, due to the circuit breaker, our traffic volume had reduced significantly. I also went to check the current traffic situation in Wuhan, China, the first city which was locked down by the Chinese government. The epicenter of this pandemic.

Source

Wuhan reopens on the day when Singapore enters into circuit breaker. This is probably another way to understand the meaning of the phrase, "when one door shuts the other opens" 😅. As you can see, even though 21 days have past, the traffic activity level is still quite far from the norm of 2019. More interestingly, people are not going out that much on the weekends. Will the same happen in other cities/countries when this pandemic dies down?

Which city are you from? How is the situation there? Leave a comment and let me know.