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FOUNDER’S<br />
NOTE<br />
have to admit, I got it wrong. When<br />
the outbreak of COVID-19 was first<br />
announced, I thought in an overly<br />
cavalier way that it would be limited<br />
to Asia, that it was primarily an issue<br />
that had affected and yet was being<br />
contained by China, and that people<br />
were being unnecessarily alarmist<br />
and even a little bit chicken sh*t about<br />
it. I continued with unrestrained<br />
abandon to indulge in my favourite<br />
group activities, from spin class to<br />
Negroni swilling, ever-confident that<br />
my seething pool of rage combined<br />
by high-intensity exercise and fuelled by an endless<br />
supply of alcohol was enough to combat and kill any virus<br />
that would dare to cross my path. And I realize now how<br />
blithely stupid I was to perceive things this way. Even<br />
a week ago, I was still up to my old bar-hopping ways,<br />
eating Asian tapas huddled shoulder to shoulder in Kiln<br />
restaurant in Soho, London. While I and those around me<br />
partied, the Vesuvius of high contagion erupted around<br />
us. I went from city to city, first Miami then to New York<br />
then to London, only mildly irritated that my trip to<br />
Milan, Perugia and Naples had to be put on hold because<br />
some random instance of the disease had been detected<br />
in Lombardy or Milan during, of all things, Fashion<br />
Week. I chuckled along with people who laughed in the<br />
face of the mounting crisis and, in particular, at people<br />
who were so timid as to feel they needed face masks.<br />
What a difference a couple of weeks makes. Because we<br />
are now amid a global pandemic the likes of which the world<br />
had never seen before; first China, and now Italy, has been<br />
devastated by the spread of the novel coronavirus, with over<br />
786,000 cases and 38,000 deaths globally. I’ve seen New<br />
York, the city that never sleeps, the greatest metropolis in<br />
the world and beloved place of my birth, turn into a ghost<br />
town overnight. I’ve seen strong decisive action taken to<br />
control the spread of the disease, in particular, to ensure<br />
that the healthcare system is not overwhelmed, in places like<br />
Singapore, and I’ve seen responses that I now realize are<br />
woefully misplaced, such as the idea of herd immunity and
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