As lion dancers snaked between conference room tables laden with plastic bottles, pens, notebooks and laptops, some staff from British gas analytics firm Servomex snapped photos of the performance meant to bring good luck and fortune.
But the January sales meeting in a luxury Singapore hotel was far from auspicious.
Someone seated in the room, or in the vicinity of the hotel that is renowned for its central location and a racy nightclub in the basement, was about to take coronavirus global.
Three weeks later, global health authorities are still scrambling to work out who carried the disease into the mundane meeting of