I should have returned from Bali today. It’s spring school holidays this week in Singapore and we booked a villa in Bali from Sunday to Thursday. There was a lot of debate if we should cancel or not due to COVID19 but in the end we decided to go. We were planning on chilling in isolation in our villa for 5 days.
It all started out good, on Saturday afternoon the airport was less busy than it could be but it was not a ghost town. The flight was only half full, and we made it through immigration in Bali in less than an hour —which is a rare feat. We checked in and enjoyed swimming in our private pool all morning Sunday.
Then, Sunday afternoon we found out that Singapore was going to impose 14 day Stay Home Notice [moh.gov.sg] (SHN) to all travelers from ASEAN countries entering Singapore after 23:59 on the 16th of March. So we decided to try and change our flights from Thursday to Monday. It was remarkable painless, the Singapore Air website worked well, somewhat surprisingly. We flew in at 10:30 PM on Monday.
So, all good. Right?
Nope. Today, due to a large surge in imported cases, made up mostly of Singaporeans and residents that were returning form overseas, the government announced [moe.gov.sg] mandatory Leave Of Absence [moh.gov.sg] (LOA) for students and staff in public schools who have recent travel history to lots of places, including to Indonesia (link is for an older advisory so the list of affected countries is now longer but the rest of the order is the same)
14 days from the date of return… meaning my kids can’t go to school next week, until April 1st (ha ha ha…). And while the LOA for the kids does not mean my wife or I are locked in, effectively one of us is as no one else can come over to watch the kids. So they are stuck in here with me for the next two weeks doing e-learning…
On the bright side we did miss a magnitude 6.3 earthquake in Bali [channelnewsasia.com] today.
