Real Life Story 1: The Day the World nearly Came to an End

Real Life Story 1: The Day the World nearly Came to an End

April 8th, 2011 → 10:13 am @ John Seah

The world would have ended in 2003.

Millions of us would have died. Not because of a nuclear war. Not because of a doomsday asteroid. But because of a near pandemic caused by an invisible killer – the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus.

The super deadly SARS virus was hyper infectious and it spread across the world at the speed of a Jumbo 747. Within weeks, the virus spread across the globe, infecting 8096 people in 37 countries. Okay, I might have exaggerated about the part regarding the end of the world. As the virus was airborne, it spread through cough, sneezes, touch, and even breath. Carried by wind, SARS spread through the masses across the streets and playground. Carried by air-conditioners, it spread to colleagues in the office, children in schools, travelers in airports, and patients in the hospitals.

All around, people were dying. Wherever there was a crowd, there would be a danger of being infected with SARS. Doctors and nurses attending to the infected became infected themselves. As the medical professionals searched frantically for a cure, there was a desperate need to isolate the infected from the uninfected.
On 3rd April, 2003, Singapore’s Ministry of Health approached the Defence Science & Technology Agency of Singapore (DSTA) and Singapore Technologies (ST) for a solution. Within a week, a prototype was up.
On April 1111th, Singapore rolled out the world’s first “SARS Thermal Scanner”, more formally known as the Infrared Fever Screening System (IFSS ).

And the world was saved. You and I can now live happily ever after.

Prior to this incident, nobody had heard of SARS before. How could Singapore suddenly invent the “SARS Thermal Scanner” within eight days?

What happened?

More about the SARS story inside the book.