THE THING is comparable to a microscopic David sling-shooting millions of giant Goliaths dead.
It’s an invader that has overturned the norms of human behavior. Unknown until December 2019, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has already afflicted 3,729,214 individuals worldwide, killing 258,394 of them.
As of yesterday, the Philippines had scored 9,684 cases, of which 637 are dead.
So why panic when those numbers are “nothing” in a country of 110 million Filipinos? According to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), an average of 1,600 Filipinos die of various causes every day.
So, why has COVID-19 become the most dreaded disease almost overnight?
My viewfinder reveals two obvious reasons. First, being new, the disease has no validated cure yet; and so survival depends on the victim’s immune system and palliative medical intervention.
Second, it is exponentially transmissible by droplets from one person to one, two, three or more persons.
Daily coverage of the contagion in the media has no doubt triggered such global panic that we dread to be in the vicinity of a COVID patient or anybody in his contact circle.
Have you heard of that boardinghouse owner refusing to admit a hospital worker due to fear that he has a COVID patient?
We laud doctors and nurses as “front-liners” in the war against the deadly virus while trying hard to conceal fear that they might have been contaminated.
Like their patients, the front-liners are victims of “justified” discrimination. They could eventually turn out COVID-positive, giving them no choice but be confined in a hospital.
And their relatives and everybody else who have kept in touch become “suspects” who need to be isolated.
Cong. Janette Garin (1st District, Iloilo), a physician and former Health Secretary, has found a way to keep her constituents/“suspects” temporarily housed in the Southern Iloilo Quarantine Facility in San Joaquin, Iloilo until proven negative of the disease. So far, it has zero occupant.
“Until a vaccine against COVID would have been developed,” Garin said in an interview with broadcaster Neri Camiña, “we could not let our guard down.”
Like most of the more than 180 COVID-infected countries, the Philippines has imposed lockdowns or “community quarantines” in most cities and provinces “to flatten the curve.”
Those who move away from home are required to wear mask and observe “social distancing” of one-meter gap between persons. Such a safeguard, ironically, has made a “new normal” out of hitherto abhorrent practices.
While in the previous year a masked man could not enter a bank, today it’s the unmask who could not.
It seems only yesterday when we welcomed with open arms homecoming seafarers and overseas foreign workers. Today, they have to be COVID-tested and quarantined for two weeks upon arrival.
The well-meaning procedure ironically put Mayor Jerry Treñas in bad light when President Duterte warned, “Sa city of Iloilo, hindi ninyo tinanggap ‘yung mga overseas Filipino workers. Sir, mayor, nakikiusap ako sa inyo,magkakaroon ho tayo ng problema if you resist.”
Duterte should have known that Treñas had never shooed OFWs away but merely observed precautionary measures, venting his ire on the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) for not coordinating with him.
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