COVID-19: Thought scary things were going to happen to me, says Seifert

After the postponement of the Indian Premier League (IPL), Seifert ended up testing positive for Covid-19 in India and he was not able to travel back home along with his teammates.

Auckland: New Zealand wicketkeeper-batsman Tim Seifert on Tuesday opened up on his battle with Covid-19 and how his stint in India really was.

After the postponement of the Indian Premier League (IPL), Seifert ended up testing positive for Covid-19 in India and he was not able to travel back home along with his teammates. KKR's Varun Chakravarthy and Sandeep Warrier returned positive tests first and then Seifert and Prasidh Krishna also returned Covid-19 positive in the test report.

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"I had a tiny cough, at the time I thought it was just a bit of asthma. My heart sank straight away, really. I just went up to my room while everything kind of got sorted out. The world kind of stops a little bit. I just couldn't really think what was next. And that was the scary part of it," stuff.co.nz quoted Seifert as saying.

"You hear about the bad things, and I thought that was going to happen to me. The news is all about a lack of oxygen, you don't know if you're going to be in that situation," he added.

Last week, Seifert tested negative for Covid-19 and he headed back home to New Zealand. He is currently undergoing mandatory 14-day quarantine in Auckland.

"It's just the whole unknown of what Covid is, how you're going to react to it. That's when things got a little bit real for me. There's a lot of people out there that have got over it, and talking to people that have had it, they were saying, 'You'll be alright', which helped me as well."

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Talking about his current mental space, Seifert said: "Once a few days had gone by, everything had kind of calmed down a little bit, the New Zealand boys had gone, then I just knew it was a time of getting through it, looking at the positives - getting married in two months, so that's exciting, and I think my fiancee, Morgs, is quite happy that I'm back a bit earlier so I can help planning for that."

On May 4, IPL 2021 was suspended indefinitely due to a rising number of Covid-19 cases.