WE HAVE been hearing and reading so many dreadful lives lost to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) that, like people from many other countries, we willingly obey “protocols” enforcing different shades of “community quarantine”.
We think “negative” whenever we hear of COVID-positive cases pushing up the numbers in the “odometer” of the World Health Organization (WHO).
Convinced that there is no cure yet for the disease, we fearfully wait for the discovery of a vaccine to come to the rescue. So we willingly stay at home, give up work or business, unmindful of where it would lead us to.
It’s queer because it’s the opposite of the traditional quarantine that isolates the proven sick; now everybody else is “presumed sick” and so must keep distance.
But have we ever stopped to think that COVID is not as morbid as widely perceived? As of yesterday, the number of cases in the Philippines had hit 14,035. It seems scary until we realize that the number of deaths so far is only 868. This means that most of the 14,035 have either recovered or are still struggling to recover.
These 868 COVID-19 deaths in three months pale in comparison to those from other diseases. As I was saying in a previous column, based on statistics from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), no less than 1,500 Filipinos die daily – yes, daily – in this country of 110 million residents.
It also goes to show that most people die of other causes – say, heart diseases which could be caused by fear of catching COVID.
I am sorry that the media have been stressing deaths, not recoveries, due to COVID-19. Otherwise, we could have enthused on how survivors have pulled through.
And so we do not know how local personages have fought and recovered. When two front-liners from the Cabinet – Secretary Eduardo Año of the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) and Secretary Leonor Briones of the Department of Education (DepEd) – caught the dreaded disease, they were big news. When they recovered, however, we hardly knew how.
Año tested COVID-positive on March 27. He underwent his second test on April 8 and got a negative result. Healed in only 12 days!
It was only through insistent research that I read about Sec. Año having revealed on radio station DzMM that he inhaled steam from a bowl of boiling water laced with salt.
This method – where the face is fully covered with a towel, eyes closed – has gone viral on the internet.
Briones, on the other hand, tested positive on April 8 and negative the second time on April 12.
Asked how she at age 79 could have remarkably recovered on “house arrest,” she told the media, “Sec. Año recommended to me the traditional ways such as gargling warm water with salt, drinking ginger tea, and eating a balanced diet.”
There is no doubt that both government officials depended only on a strong immune system to beat the dreaded “incurable” disease.
I, too, believe that a truly healthy person does not have to rely on vaccines, antibiotics and antiviral drugs because the human body already contains all the bug-fighting medicines it needs.
Gynecologists tell mothers-to-be to breast-feed so that by the time her infant turns one year old, he will have developed a trillion different antibiotic and antiviral agents in his body to protect him from diseases.
If the child retains these antibodies and immune cell warriors into adulthood through healthy food and exercise, then he remains ready to battle bacterial and viral enemies. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
