New Zealand cricketer Tim Seifert couldn’t hold back his tears while narrating his experience of staying back in India after testing positive for COVID-19 during the now-suspended IPL 2021.

Seifert, who was part of the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) squad, failed both his pre-departure RT-PCR tests and wasn’t allowed to board the charter flight back home with other Kiwi players and support staff.

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Seifert became the last overseas cricketer to leave India as he tested COVID-19 negative last week.

Now back in New Zealand, Seifert said his "heart sank straight away" when a team official informed him about his positive report.

"The world kind of stops a little bit," he told reporters in a video call from hotel quarantine in Auckland. "I just couldn’t really think what was next. And that was the scary part of it.

"You hear about the bad things, and I thought that was going to happen to me."

It was right after this the emotions got the better of Tim Seifert and he took a moment to gather himself before resume speaking.

"The news (in India) is all about a lack of oxygen, you don’t know if you’re going to be in that situation," he said.

"It’s just the whole unknown of what COVID is, how you’re going to react to it."

He thanked Brendon McCullum and Stephen Fleming for helping him during the difficult phase.

“They made everything a lot easier,” Seifert said. “They made sure that things would be put in place and the CSK management and 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’d try everything to get me home safely.”

“It was definitely hard getting told but once a few days had gone by and everything had calmed down a bit… I just knew it was about getting through it and thinking of the positives,” he added.