If everything is carrying out as planned, the holiday should start on March 30. But not, our holiday started early. In fact, today is the last day of school, and starting from tomorrow people will all be on social media, YouTube or Netflix for the whole day. The reason why this is happening, well, the school sent us the explanations:

School is not closing because the Government requires us to do so. Instead, we are bringing the holidays a week earlier. The email sent to your parents (see below) explains why this is happening. The main reason is the increasing travel restrictions and preventative measures for COVID-19. As a result of these measures – particularly the changes in Malaysia – we thought it better to have an earlier holiday break to enable the situation to settle and everyone to stay fit and healthy.

An email sent by our high school principal

All of these make sense, but the strange thing is, why did school ends on a Wednesday and not on a Friday as usual? What makes the school to end so early, is very likely to be the first suspected case of COVID-19 in UWC. It was not the student that was infected and no one was confirmed of getting the virus. It was that a parent of one of our children in the Junior School on Dover Campus had tested initially positive for COVID-19. The parent is not yet a confirmed case from the Ministry of Health (MoH), has no symptoms and has not been on campus for several months.

It was really scary and I was in horror after I found out that the child of the parent who got sick, is in the same class with my younger sister’s classmate’s elder sister. This sounds quite complicated, but it means that there is a chance for the virus to get to me, and not until this point did I realized how close the COVID-19 virus is to me, and how much more dangerous had my life and the lives of many others become.

Anyways good luck everyone during the holiday!

Live Each Day As If It Was Your Last

Steve Jobs