Like most other students during the Sars pandemic, Mr S Prabu Dev – who was primary two at the time – found school mundane and boring.

As an eight-year-old boy, the only things he remotely enjoyed, was being able to skip morning assembly and watching Phua Chu Kang rap about Sars on television.

He would try to blow hot air onto the thermometer before putting it into his mouth, hoping that the temperature reading would, with a bit of luck, exceed 37.8C.

Prabu and his classmates knew that getting anything above 37.8C meant a trip to the sickbay, where they could rest and avoid classes. What Prabu didn’t expect was that one day, he’d be down with a fever in school.

He recalls how he was rushed to the sickbay by his concerned teachers.

“The teachers were very cautious; they would take your temperature at the holding area,” says Prabu, now a Master of Science at the National University of Singapore.

“My temperature was still above 37C after resting, so they immediately called my parents to bring me to a clinic.”

Prabu, thankfully, was later discharged from the clinic with a fever diagnosis, not Sars. However, the speed at which his teachers responded to his case still impresses him.

“When Sars first hit Singapore in 2003, for the starting few weeks, the teachers were hectic. But by the time schools reopened in April, they were much more well trained. They knew how to approach and handle cases.”

This same spirit of preparedness has also been carried over to dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, 17 years later. Most of the measures that were taken against Sars, such as temperature taking exercises and isolation, are now being carried out against Covid-19.