The lives of thousands of GPs have been turned up-side-down since COVID-19.

Here Dr Thileepan Naren offers his story: the sleepless nights, the fight to source supplies and his view, that despite it all, we remain the lucky country.

If I am to be brutally honest, I have to admit that when I first heard about the coronavirus outbreak in China late last year, I thought it was largely a media beat-up.

Like a lot of those epidemics that occur overseas, such as SARS and avian influenza, I did not think that it would touch my medical practice and the lives of my patients. And even when it crept closer and started spreading to nearby countries like Korea, Japan and then on to Iran and Italy, I saw the TV images, I felt for those affected, but it came to me as tragedy at a distance.