[S I M T A N]

why need 3 maids
and understood maids likely to spread

Over a cuppa lately, I listened as my bosom friend related the sequence of events leading up to his grandpa’s household getting infected with covid and his untimely death.

The head of the family used to have 2 domestic workers all along until 3 years ago when his then maids struggled to cope with the heavy workload that included endless household chores and doubling as caregivers for him and his wife. The oldies were getting increasingly frail and required a lot of care.
 
His youngest son and his wife, both medical doctors, reside at his good class bungalow to take care of their dietary, nutritional and medical needs. His 5 other grown children with their families in the vicinity.
 
The close-knit family is alive to the fact that a lot of maids were infected during their outings and became spreaders. During the pandemic, throngs of maids could be seen socializing or picnicking in public places on their day offs, unmasked and chattering away happily.
 
Being ultra-cautious the family had a number of safeguards to protect the family patriarch and ma’am against the highly transmissible virus, such as instructing their helpers to wear their masks when receiving parcels from deliverymen and whenever contractors were about to step into the house. Moreover, everyone outside of the patriarch’s household had to mask up in his presence, and those wishing to have meals with him had to first take an ART self-test.
 
Despite all the safeguards, they had not been able to keep the virus at bay. It all started with the longest-serving maid taking a day off. The once-a-month break is sacrosanct to her. 4 days after her Sunday outing, another maid was the first to feel unwell. Shortly afterwards, the other 2 maids, incl the one who went out, began to develop flu-like symptoms - a high temperature, running nose, headache and so on.
 
After the shocking discovery that all 3 maids had been sickened by covid, the doc son queried the maid whether she had donned her mask during her outing. She denied going maskless, insisting she had her mask on all the time, and was with a friend only.
 
But according to another maid, the one who went out had a feast with her countrywomen in a restaurant in City Plaza, a favourite haunt of Indonesian foreign workers. Their usual round of merrymaking followed, with the Indonesians taking selfies of themselves.
 
When restrictions on indoor dining were peeled back, infections soared. That’s because people dined, socialised and talked to each other unmasked. What irked the doc is the fact that the maids did not inform him or his wife when they weren’t feeling well. Moreover, they were coughing without taking precautions by wearing a mask and didn’t bother to self-test, in non-compliance with the docs’ instruction.
 
Given that all of them do not wear masks at home and are in close proximity with each other, getting infected was almost a certainty. One after another fell victim to the virus, with the doc himself the last person in the household to be infected.

On reflection, their mistake of not reporting their indisposition and leaving it as it is can be chalked up to inexperience. Or else they could have brushed their ailments off as just a cold or a bad bout of the common flu that would go away soon. Little did they realise that their ‘common cold’ would turn out to be something sinister - the dreaded covid symptoms.