Singapore's Bangladeshi personnel have eyes on home as coronavirus shakes community

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Along with his shaggy grey beard, rose-colored robe and a prayer cap that extends his tall frame, shopkeeper Tariqul Islam can be an imposing figure on the stall-lined street that delivers home comforts to Singapore’s Bangladeshi community.

He stands out even more now a lot of his customers have gone the united states or been told to avoid crowds after a coronavirus outbreak infected some Bangladeshi construction workers, thinning out the normally bustling thoroughfare.

Unease over the virus has gripped sets of migrant personnel across Asia - who often stay in crowded, cramped conditions - and their own families thousands of miles away who want them to come back home.

“A lot of people have gone back,” said Islam, 52, as a few customers wearing masks perused the fruit and veggies spread outside his shop on Lembu Road in Singapore’s Little India neighborhood. “When persons consider life or family, they don’t value money.”

The road, blocked off to traffic and patrolled by security staff on weekends, was drastically quieter than usual when Reuters visited on Sunday.

Singapore has reported 90 coronavirus cases, five involving Bangladeshis who worked at the same construction site. One is in a “very critical condition,” Bangladesh’s foreign minister said.

A Bangladeshi in the United Arab Emirates in addition has been infected, as have Filipino and Indonesian domestic employees in Singapore and Hong Kong.

In Singapore, construction personnel from South Asia often live in 12-bed dormitories with shared bathrooms. Some of the high-profile virus clusters through the outbreak have involved people living close together, such as in prisons or aboard cruise lines.

The virus, SARS-CoV-2, has killed a lot more than 2,600 in China, where it first surfaced late this past year.

Kakon Miyan, a 24-year-old construction worker in Singapore, said a lot of his friends had returned to Bangladesh, where there were no reported cases of the virus, and will only keep coming back when the city-state appears clear.

“We’re staying for the present time, but maybe if the situation worsens then we will return back too,” he said, speaking in Bengali alongside a few colleagues.

Bangladesh’s high commission in Singapore said it's been trying to stop persons from leaving by contacting them online and visiting dormitories at hand out masks, hand sanitizer and leaflets about the virus printed in their native language.

“We are becoming a little proactive to stop them leaving the united states... to assure them that this is not something we have to be excessively or illogically fearful about,” High Commissioner Mustafizur Rahman told Reuters.

The country has no restrictions on happen to be or from Singapore.

There remain 150,000 Bangladeshis in the city-state, in line with the high commission’s website, making them one of its major immigrant populations.
Source: https://www.reuters.com

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