{"id":3633,"date":"2009-05-05T07:04:37","date_gmt":"2009-05-04T23:04:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=3633"},"modified":"2009-05-05T07:04:37","modified_gmt":"2009-05-04T23:04:37","slug":"living-in-interesting-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2009\/05\/05\/living-in-interesting-days\/","title":{"rendered":"Living in Interesting Days"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; display: inline; margin-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; border-right: 0px\" title=\"blog-scanning\" src=\"https:\/\/chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/blogscanning.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"blog-scanning\" width=\"271\" height=\"271\" align=\"right\" \/> Who would have thought: viruses mutated with pigs thrown somewhere into the mixture.<\/p>\n<p>These couple of days have been, well, interesting. 6 years ago in 2003 there was the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome\">SARS<\/a> scare. I missed on all that though: I&#8217;d just arrived in Perth when the epidemic was just starting to spread in Australia. Aside from a few casual mentions of the virus in International News, there was little local reaction to the SARS scare.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, the only time when I finally realized how big a concern the epidemic was in Singapore was when I returned to Singapore in June that year and saw thermal scanners set up at the airport.<\/p>\n<p>This week in Singapore, there&#8217;s the glut of newly instituted medical checks and temperature taking procedures at so many places. All this is especially new to me. Ling on the other hand&#8217;s nonplussed about the whole thing. In fact, between the two of us, she&#8217;s experienced!<\/p>\n<p>We were at Compass Point last week for a Subway dinner, when we had the following conversation. Ling asked:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">\u201cYou know the swine virus thing? Do you think it&#8217;s possible that the virus was deliberately created then released so that some pharmacy company can sell its vaccine and make a lot of money..?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I laughed:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">\u201cDear, you&#8217;ve been watching too much <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mission_Impossible_2#Plot\">Mission: Impossible<\/a>!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Who would have thought: viruses mutated with pigs thrown somewhere into the mixture. These couple of days have been, well, interesting. 6 years ago in 2003 there was the SARS scare. I missed on all that though: I&#8217;d just arrived<\/p>\n<div class=\"entry-read-more\"><a class=\"read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2009\/05\/05\/living-in-interesting-days\/\">Read More<span class=\"cleanwp-sr-only\">  Living in Interesting Days<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-home","category-news-letters","wpcat-6-id","wpcat-12-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3633\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}