How to organise a wedding during Covid-19 in Singapore: amid lockdowns and travel bans, this couple had a downsized wedding reception at the Singapore Island Country Club
- Wedding guests socially distanced, donned masks, did temperature checks and registered with contact tracing app Trace Together
- Instead of a cocktail party, DJ, photo booth and traditional Chinese wedding banquet, the reception was more subdued – but still special
Shoshi Kudo and Gina Loh had visions of a big white wedding with 180 guests, including Kudo’s family flying in from Japan, when he proposed to her in January 2020 during a mountain hiking holiday.
But three months later, Singapore went into lockdown amid the coronavirus pandemic and all weddings were prohibited.
When the coupled married on January 9 this year, only 100 guests could attend, provided they all took painstaking steps to maintain social distancing – including being divided into two “zones” of 50 people. Their pandemic wedding had to be radically different to what they had envisaged a year earlier.
Some friends decided to postpone theirs until the pandemic was over but Kudo and Loh, who met on a blind date in 2015, didn’t want to put their lives on hold.
The couple initially booked a church in June 2020, when Singapore lifted restricted first imposed in April. But plans for their reception hung in the balance.
On October 3, 2020, the government announced that weddings could have up to 100 guests. The couple decided to book the Grand Ballroom at the Singapore Island Country Club for a last-minute reception.
While the couple could have some familiar elements to the day, much of their original plan had to be scrapped or curbed.
