SINGAPORE - First he was told he had just three hours to catch a flight to India, where he would stay for nine days of work. Then he returned to Singapore, only to be asked to fly off again the very next day.

As a manager at ST Logistics who had not gone overseas in the 27 years prior, Mr Jayakumar Manickam was not your typical jet-setting employee. But "without a second thought", he was prepared to go where he was sent - to procure surgical face masks for Singapore at the start of 2020.

"I said, 'Okay, I'll do it because it's for the country'," Mr Jayakumar recounted in an interview for In This Together: Singapore's Covid-19 Story, a new book on the first two years of the country's pandemic fight.

Since the start of the pandemic, unsung heroes like Mr Jayakumar - alongside the likes of healthcare workers, cleaners, swabbers, home recovery coordinators - have often gone above and beyond the call of duty, wrote Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in his foreword to the book.

Mr Jayakumar, for one, went from being at his office desk in Pioneer Road at 3pm on Jan 20, 2020, to inspecting masks at a factory in the Indian city of Bengaluru at 3am, amid a dearth of such essential items then as the pandemic loomed large.

Among other things, he had to slice open the masks to ensure filter layers had not been replaced with another material.

A few days later, in Singapore, Government Technology Agency (GovTech) engineer Joel Kek left his Chinese New Year reunion dinner early to go home and start tinkering with Bluetooth technology as a means to facilitate contact tracing - where proximity, rather than location, is key.

"The virus cares more about who you are with rather than where you are," said Mr Kek.

He had a prototype a week later and in March, the TraceTogether app was launched.

Another GovTech employee, Mr Roland Tan, was behind the idea of the digital check-in tool SafeEntry, which started out in February 2020 as an online form on an iPad and underwent several iterations before becoming a tap-and-go system merged with TraceTogether.

In May 2020, when SafeEntry was mandated at malls, retail outlets, schools and workplaces, "total chaos" ensued, said Mr Tan.

With some infrastructure not yet ready, the GovTech team had to manually process applications from more than 58,000 locations and 30,000 businesses for SafeEntry QR codes.

Mr Tan recalled receiving an e-mail every few seconds that weekend. "I had to turn off my notifications because it was like music," he said.

Public servants aside, others on the front line include regular folks volunteering to distribute food, make masks and - in the case of retiree Zulkifli Atnawi and his four children, developing a full-fledged social outreach programme out of their two-room rental flat.

Project Hills started in April 2020 to help neighbours in the Queenstown area with groceries, but has since expanded to fulfil all manner of needs - such as delivering fresh diapers to a family which had been washing and reusing them because they could not afford new ones.

With the help of about 100 volunteers and donations totalling more than $300,000, Mr Zulkifli has helped over 1,000 residents as at December last year (2021).

As the book notes, it is not just material help being extended but also the kampung spirit of caring - a trait evident in the Singaporeans who stepped up to the plate over the last two years, including the nameless ones.

The chief executive officer of food charity Food from the Heart, Ms Sim Bee Hia, recalled in the book how a teenage girl contributed 20 sets of food supplies bought with money she had pooled with friends.

This was in March 2020, when the public was encouraged not to stockpile food amid panic buying islandwide.

It turned out the teenager had pleaded with the supermarket manager to let her buy the food so she could donate them.

"There were a lot of these unwritten stories. Unsung heroes and the day-to-day things that warm you and drive you further," said Ms Sim. "There were many angels looking out for us."