Swiney Thingy

All these while, I have only been reading about it in the newspapers or seeing and hearing the news bulletin. Well, yeah, it is up to the pandemic level declared by some god-knows officials in the WHO whom are sitting very cosily in their hermetically-sealed office somewhere up there in the Alpines. Or how our own gomen are giving conflicting messages by saying both people should not be panicking because everything is under control and all these cases confirmed in our bolehland are in fact "imported" ones from overseas and no local transmission has been detected. And yet, at the same time, reminding people how easily this disease could be transmitted and proceed everything that you do in life with extreme caution and avoid unnecessary socialising stuff etcetera etcetera.

However, somehow slowly this virus seems to be inching towards home ground. Surely, my desk job, deeply rooted home-bound lifestyle does not much translate much into the risk contracting the disease under foreseeable circumstances (or wifey for that matter). But signs of the impending approaches are already rearing its ugly head. A colleague who came back from the land down under (not the epicentre of the spread though thankfully) was showing signs of either cold or flu symptoms (definitely not observations as made clear by hafiz in one of his entry) such as sneezing, red and runny nose about a week after she came back. And the last I heard (and I don't bump into her that much it seems) she was just dismissing it as a common cold which has nothing to be worried about. True enough, under different circumstances, I'd be one of those last ones to be rushing to the clinic to at the first sign of fever or coughs and would bear through it until wifey would be sick enough of listening to my big baby whining and forced me to get my big butt to the clinic. But this is not a normal circumstance and I surely would hope she would get herself checked. On second thoughts, I did not see her at the office at all today so probably gart or somebody else has finally knocked some senses into her head.

Moreover, I was also informed by my colleague this afternoon that his sister has been sent away to the Hospital Sungai Buloh because she has become a suspect case of one. And she has not been travelling anywhere lately so would she go down the record as the first locally-transmitted swiney case? Only time and some samples of her blood would tell, I guess.

As for now, I am not in the panicky stage yet. Shaqeef has been enduring his cough for about a week. Not those disheartening, consistent cough but more like a little coughing in the morning and almost non-existent throughout the day kind of cough though it did degenerate into those deep, chesty cough but Alhamdulillah he recovered by the time we got back from the office in the evening so considering that he's only turning 5 months old at the end of the month, I have held out the clinic visit for now. Not quite a big fan of drugs especially given to such a small baby unnecessarily.

Or should I be panicking now already?