My heart sank when everyone left: Seifert recalls Covid in IPL

Auckland, May 25 (IANS) New Zealand wicketkeeper-batsman Tim Seifert, who was one of four Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) players to test positive for Covid-19, said his heart sank the moment he first heard result of his test and struggled to accept that he was the only overseas player stranded.

"I got pulled aside and told I'd tested positive and my heart sank straight away when everyone left. I was the only overseas player basically still left in India out of the whole tournament. That's when things got a little bit real," Seifert was quoted as saying by New Zealand Herald on Tuesday.

Seifert, who is isolating in Auckland after returning from India, has another week before he returns home on June 2 or 3, just under a month after his first test yielded positive result.

"The world stops a little bit, I just couldn't really think what was next and that's the scary part of it - you hear about things, and I thought that was going to happen to me," said the 26-year-old.

"My room looked over the entrance of the hotel so when they were leaving I was waving goodbye to them," he added.

As time went by, he started to come to terms.

"Once a few days had gone by, everything had kind of died down a little bit… I just knew it was a time of getting through it, looking at the positives. I'm getting married in two months so that's exciting. My fiancée Morgs - she's quite happy that I'm back a bit earlier so I can help plan for that," said Seifert who has played three ODIs and 35 T20 Internationals.

"It definitely was hard and I couldn't thank Brendan [McCullum] and [Stephen] Fleming enough, they made everything a lot easier. Making sure things would be put in place and the KKR, the CSK support staff, management, CEO of KKR -- they made life easy for me to know that everything would be alright and when that time was to come home, they would do everything to get me home safely and on time," he further said.

He said that quarantining was the toughest part and not the virus itself since he had a very mild infection.

"From my point of view of going back, I'm very lucky that having Covid has very minimal-mild symptoms. From having the virus and how I'm feeling, if that was going to be the whole time then I'd be happy. It's more about the process of quarantining, being stuck in a room knowing that if I get it I could get it worse, other people could get it worse," he added.