A Bangladeshi migrant worker, Zakir Hossain Khokan, living in Singapore, has opened up about his experience at dealing with Covid-19 in an interview with Mothership.
Zakir Hossain Khokan, 41, is a migrant worker, writer, and photographer who has been working in Singapore for the past 17 years. He is a construction supervisor, and was living at Cochrane Lodge II prior to being confirmed to have Covid-19 in April. Since then, he has been in hospitals, community isolation, and recovery facilities.
The story began when his Indian roommate, who is also a worker, tested positive for Covid-19 back on April 11.
Initially, Zakir was not very concerned that he might have caught the disease too. He even encouraged others living in the apartment not to worry. But three days later he started to feel sick and found that he had fever.
When he told his roommates how he was feeling and that he wanted to go to the hospital to take tests for Covid-19, they advised him against it and said he should just take paracetamol.
He then took the matter to a security guard who dismissed his concerns and asked him to just rest in his room. The guard thought he was feeling unwell because he was sharing his room with many other workers.
Zakir caught a lucky break when he spotted an official from the Ministry of Manpower in the premises. He knew the official since he routinely visited to conduct mental health checks on migrant workers.
When asked for help, the official arranged an ambulance to take Zakir to the Khoo Teck Puat hospital.
Upon arrival, Zakir had to fill out some forms and then wait at a temporary shelter outside the hospital, all while he was feeling extremely bad. He could barely sit up but the shelter had no beds.
After asking quite a few nurses Zakir got one of them to bring in a wheeled bed for him to lie down on. When he laid down the nurses started to check him, but Zakir was close to being senseless at that point and soon passed out.
He woke up the next morning to find he barely had the strength to stand up. After a while he was informed that he had tested positive for Covid-19.
Zakir stayed at the hospital from April 16 to April 29 to recover. He was tested again on April 27 but was never informed of its result.
On April 29, he was moved to the Tanjong Gul camp to continue his recovery. Even though he had recovered somewhat by then, he said his experience at the camp was horrible.
He was forced to live in a tent, inside which it was very hot during the day. The doctor he was appointed there also seemed not to care very much and treated him with neglect, said Zakir. Days passed and still he was not informed of the result of his second test.
Zakir had many more complaints about life at Tanjong Gul. The doctors there reportedly took a long time to provide medicine after checking patients. Zakir had problems related to blood pressure but he was denied blood pressure tablets for a while. Patients, sometimes, also had to walk long distances for their appointments.
At one point, Zakir even had an appointment where the doctor forced him to walk back to his tent to fetch some old medication for reference. The doctor even followed him in his vehicle but did not let the weak Zakir into his vehicle at any point.
On the day of the interview, on May 14, he was still not sure if he had fully recovered. He was still living at the camp.
Zakir said that he previously had a very positive impression about Singapore that was tarnished in the course of his recovery from Covid-19, such was the experience.
Despite expressing gratitude towards the doctors, nurses, and other health workers who had helped him along the way, Zakir expressed grave disappointment at how he was treated by the system, and feared that other migrant workers had similar experiences.
He ended his story saying he was unsure of whether he would want to keep working in Singapore once he recovered fully and had the option to return to his home country.