"Please be responsible, be honest about your travel history and follow orders to stay at home."
This is the message that 25-year-old Aida Nabila Mohamad Ghazali, who has so far lost five family members to the virus, wants to put across to the public.
Aida, a master's degree student at Universiti Putra Malaysia, recently had to bury her grandmother, an uncle and an aunt, and two distant relatives in Kuching, Sarawak after all of them succumbed to Covid-19.
Health authorities had traced the source of infection to a colleague of her aunt. The aunt lives in the same house as Aida's late grandmother together with her three siblings (another aunt of Aida and two uncles).
The colleague, referred by the Health Ministry as Patient 1,580, had returned from Italy.
At the time, the federal government had yet to impose mandatory self-quarantine measures. Compulsory isolation at quarantine centres took effect on April 3.
But Sarawak government had since March 5 ordered all those residing in Sarawak to undergo home quarantine for 14 days if they had just returned from Italy.
However, Aida said her aunt's colleague turned up for work.
It was not until the middle of March that the family noticed something was amiss.
It started with Aida's 79-year-old paternal grandmother who was admitted to a private hospital with pneumonia on March 16.
She later asked to be discharged and taken home to spend her final hours with her family. At the time, she had yet to be diagnosed with Covid-19.
"Many questioned why we took my grandmother back to her home. But it was actually her who really wanted to go home as if she knew that her time was coming.
"She only had a few hours at her house before she breathed her last at about 2am," Aida said on Twitter.
Read more at https://m.malaysiakini.com/news/519146
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