Fortunately, the symptoms tend to be mild, the anti-viral drug Tamiflu has been shown to be effective, and so far there has been no deaths. However, as cases rise, sooner or later someone with pre-existing health problems will also catch the virus, and we may see our first fatality.

Currently, Singapore is still quarantining every case we find. Beyond a certain point, however, we will not have the resources to do so, and H1N1 will be managed by polyclinics and general practitioners. Most cases will be sent home to rest and only the severe ones will be hospitalised. Satku told the media that on present trends, this point may be reached quite soon.

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My brother-in-law saw for himself how overstretched medical personnel were at Tan Tock Seng and the Communicable Disease Centre (CDC) earlier this week. He was treated as a possible case and had to report there in order to be cleared.

What happened was this: Two hours after a tandoori chicken lunch, his stomach revolted. A fever soon came on. By 6 p.m. my sister insisted that he should see a doctor, and off they went to a family clinic in Bukit Timah.

Almost as soon as the clinic confirmed that he was running a fever of 40.5 degrees, "the SOP kicked in," he told me, referring to a standard operating procedure. "They told me to go to Tan Tock Seng Hospital and would call for an ambulance if I needed one."

Go immediately, they were told, his stomach complaint unheeded.

6:45 p.m. Arriving at Tan Tock Seng's Accident and Emergency Department (A&E), he was met with a stern command. Get rid of the mask you're wearing. Put this other one on. He did as instructed. Noticing that it was a thicker, heavier-duty type, he passed a comment about the N95 standard for masks. He was met with a glare that said, "Don't be a smart aleck."

After being screened and his temperature taken again, he was told, "A guard will come and take you to the CDC." He waited. A while later, a doctor came, said "follow me" and ... Oh, these are highly-qualified guards they have at Tan Tock Seng, my brother-in-law said to himself, now careful not to say such things aloud lest he get another "Don't be a smart aleck" glare.

"So here I was, someone running a temperature of 40.5 degrees, and I had to follow him and walk, yes walk, a block and a half to the CDC."

At the CDC was another marquee. Inside, straight-backed chairs had been arranged in military formation, each about two or three metres apart. There were altogether some 60 - 70 chairs, he estimated. In front of each chair was a little table. He was told to sit at an assigned chair -- for the next six hours -- with a clipboard holding a checklist on the table in front of him His chair was the one nearest the airconditioner that constantly blew at him and past him to the rest of the space.

While there, they took his medical history -– "I'm telling you, it's a stomach upset" -– and, at repeated intervals, took his blood pressure and other vital signs. Sometime during the period, he had to go to an adjacent building for an x-ray, and they also took some blood for tests. Unavoidably, he had to get up from the chair now and then to go to the toilet, so he wasn't exactly tied to his chair all the time.

They offered him a gurney to lie on if he felt too weak to sit. "I wasn't about to die," he recalled, "so I wasn't going to lie on one of those things."

At about 9 p.m. two tablets of Panadol were given to him. At last, they were attending to his fever.

And sat there upright for three hours more.

"I wished I had my camera with me," he told me. It was an interesting enough experience to record, but I think if he had whipped out a camera, a posse of policemen would have swooped down on him suspecting him to be a bio-terrorist out to plan an attack on Singapore's medical defence system.

Around midnight, word came that he was "unlikely" to have the H1N1 flu. The officer informed him that after he's got his prescription, he could go home.

"Do you need us to call an ambulance to send you home?" she asked solicitously.

"What? Do you guys use ambulances like taxis?" -- that's what he wanted to say, but once again, kept smart-alecky comments to himself. "No, I'll call my wife," was what he actually said. He borrowed a phone and gave her the good news.

12.30 a.m. My sister arrives at Tan Tock Seng A&E where she had left her husband earlier, and was told she was at the wrong place. The CDC's not here, but over there, she was told. She had to get out to Moulmein Road again and in by another gate. There, she asked the guard to inform whoever was in charge inside that she had come to fetch so-and-so.

"You call him yourself and tell him to come out," said the guard.

"I can't," she said. "He doesn't have his mobile phone with him." Being so ill, he hadn't taken it along when he went to the Bukit Timah clinic.

"He has no mobile phone?" asked the guard, incredulous. Wasn't everybody in Singapore supposed to be armed with a cellphone?

"He looked like he didn't know what to do," my sister told me. "It wasn't in the SOP." The guard then had to make a number of calls to find out where exactly the patient was and to convey a message that he could come out now.

The reply was: he couldn't. He was still waiting for his medicine.

It wasn't until about 1 a.m. when they finally handed him a bagful of pills. Thankfully, included among them were some antibiotics meant for the food poisoning. At least they hadn't forgotten that that was why he went to the doctor in the first place.

"I can see they were really stretched," he said by way of a forgiving conclusion.

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