- Andrea Goh and around 400 other people were placed in the
Shangri-La hotel inSingapore for 14 days when they landed back in the country. - The day before she returned, the government passed a law that said anyone returning to the country would have to
quarantine in a hotel for two weeks due to thecoronavirus pandemic. - When Goh saw she would be living in the five-star resort, she thought it wasn't bad at all.
- She really enjoyed her stay and vlogged the experience for anyone who was worried about going through the same thing.
- The 400 or so residents became a community, she said, having Zoom parties, playing music on their balconies, and watching video lessons through the hotel's Facebook page.
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
Andrea Goh was anxious about what would await her back in Singapore, her home country, as she was boarding a flight back at the end of March. She was travelling back in case she needed to seek medical treatment during the coronavirus pandemic, leaving her life and boyfriend behind in London.
"I was personally very afraid," she told Insider. "I was like, 'Oh my God, will we be stuck in army barracks or bunk bed situations?' I think I was quite worried, but in the end it turned out be the total opposite of what I was expecting."
The day before she flew, the government had announced everyone coming back to the country from the UK or US would have to be in quarantine at a hotel for 14 days. Goh was uncertain about what that meant until she saw the words "Shangri-La" on the document handed to her at the airport and breathed a sigh of relief.
A government-funded quarantine
Goh was escorted to Shangri-La's Rasa Sentosa Resort & Spa on Sentosa Island in Singapore, a five-star beachfront resort with six restaurants and bars, a landscape garden, pool, and spa which normally costs around $250 for a standard room per night. Over 400 people were put in rooms there during Goh's stay.
A two-week stay should have cost about $3,500, but the Singaporean government fronted the costs for everyone placed in the Shangri-La and other
"A lot of people in Singapore have been saying 'this is tax payer money, so why are we putting people up in luxury hotels?'" said Goh. "But what I've heard is the hotels don't make anything. They are just covering the cost of maintaining the property."
The government pays for food and labor, which is usually paid hourly, she said. It will go some way to helping Singapore's hotel industry, which has taken a battering during the pandemic.
"If no one is staying in these hotels, these people won't get paid," she said. "So it has created jobs."
Vlogging the hotel experience
When Goh got to her hotel room, a lot of her friends started asking her the same questions: What was the hotel like, what could she do there, did they provide her with food? And so on. So Goh decided to answer them all at once by vlogging the duration of her stay.
She started filming at the airport and then uploaded a video every day to show her friends what she was up to. She also wanted to provide information to anyone who was coming back to Singapore unsure of what to expect.
Not everyone experiencing the mandatory two week quarantine will get a hotel as fancy as a five-star Shangri-La, so Goh appreciates how lucky she was. She had a room with a balcony facing the South China Sea, had $20 of free laundry service a day, and was given meals catered by the Shangri-La chefs.
She said she stuck to what she was given rather than ordering room service because she liked not having to plan her meals.
"It actually relieved a lot of pressure from having to think about what to eat next," she said. "I don't know if anyone else had that thought. It was actually freeing in a sense."
She also got to spend a lot of time painting and drawing — anything that would distract her from starting her PhD thesis on architectural policy.
It wasn't exactly a holiday, though, as immigration control would text the residents every day and ask them to share their location. The hotel also had surveillance on every corridor to make sure nobody was wandering around.
Goh said the guests and the hotel staff all became a community thanks to a Facebook group they were all invited to. Everyone could chat with each other and set up Zoom calls, take part in "happy hours," and give the hotel some feedback.
"One of the things I asked was 'who are these people who are putting food at my door and calling me to check if I'm OK?'" Goh said. "Every day we'd get a phone call from the front desk to ask each of us how we were feeling and what our temperature was. So I just really wanted to see who these people calling me, leaving food outside my room, doing laundry were."
'It slowly formed a community'
The hotel then set up special classes for everyone to join to introduce them to some of the staff. The chefs showed them how to cook pizzas and Madeleines, while the housekeepers demonstrated how to make animal shapes out of the towels.
"It slowly formed a community of the other residents," Goh said. "We never saw a lot of the other residents, except for our direct neighbors, but we started chatting and knowing each other more. It was so funny to engage with people I had never seen face to face before."
Every night at 8 p.m., Singaporeans currently go outside and clap for healthcare workers — a trend that is occurring all across the globe.
One evening, while everyone was out on their balconies, one of the hotel guests started playing the violin.
"Most of us could hear it on our side but I couldn't even tell which direction it was coming from," said Goh. "And then there was a guy playing a Chinese flute, and both of them would come out and play every evening after that."
In Singapore the lockdown is called a 'circuit breaker'
Singapore had a rather different reaction to the coronavirus pandemic than countries like the UK and US, Goh said. For starters the social distancing measures are called a "circuit breaker" rather than a "lockdown."
"I think when they did pass the law, the word 'lockdown' sounded too severe and very jarring, like it was removing your freedom," said Goh. "So they avoided using the word 'lockdown' in all their speeches and all their televised conferences. It was always called the circuit breaker because it's breaking the trend of the virus."
While the country has kept its public transmission numbers of the virus relatively low, with just over 11,000 cases, Goh hopes it will bring awareness to the many foreign construction workers from Bangladesh, China, and India who are living in cramped and unsanitary dormitories and reported to make up 60% of the country's coronavirus cases.
Everyone coming back to the country from abroad is made comfortable in hotels and treated really well, she said, while foreign workers are living in tight conditions that are a catalyst for the spread of COVID-19.
"Out of the 400 of those cases that were reported yesterday, only 44 were within the public," she said. 'The rest were in these dormitories. So the Prime Minister did say that we are as strong as our weakest link, and at the moment this is our weakest link. So I hope that this whole thing shines some light on how these foreign workers are living in Singapore."
Saying goodbye
When her 14 days were up, it was time for Goh to leave the Shangri-La. She said she and a lot of the friends she had made during her stay were sad to be leaving when they said their goodbyes on a final Zoom call. She said some of them have made a plan to go back to the hotel one day when the pandemic is over, and all stay in the same rooms they were assigned to during the quarantine.
"I was quite sad leaving because I started to become very comfortable with the living situation," she said. "Even though I was on my own I never felt completely alone."
Goh opened her door and was greeted by one of the staff members of the hotel, who would guide her and some other guests down to the lobby.
"He just shouted, 'Welcome home guys,' and I almost cried," she said. "I don't know why but it was so overwhelming."
Goh said she almost forgot what was going on in the world while she was at Shangri-La because she was absorbed in her art and the little community she had made. While she really enjoyed being able to switch off from everything, she did like the freedom of being in the real world again.
"It was the start of the circuit breaker for all households in Singapore so we went from one quarantine to another quarantine," she said. "But at least there were other people around. And nothing beats your own bed. And your own toilet."
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