ILOILO City and Province are back to Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ).
I’m not surprised. COVID-19 positive cases are still up. On top of that, the Genome Testing Center detected the Delta variant of the COVID-19 various in Region 6, particularly in Antique province which strangely is under the milder General Community Quarantine (GCQ).
Of course, there’s no truth to the rumor that the ECQ is courtesy of a heated argument on Zoom between Interior undersecretary Densing and Mayor Geronimo.
The ECQ took effect on July 16 till the 31st or perhaps until the COVID-19 positive cases go down.
On the bright side, vaccination in “I Am Iloilo City” is going well and vaccines have been steadily arriving. Right now the city has five vaccination centers and there are plans to open more and bring the vaccinations to the barangays, including doing house-to-house for the non- ambulant seniors with comorbidities.
“I Am Iloilo City” now averages 7,000-plus vaccination per day.
Take note folks, the vaccine will not make you COVID-19-proof. What it will do is to prevent you from being seriously ill and hospitalized, including dying from the virus. It will also stop if not minimize you from infecting others.
So even if you are fully vaccinated you must continue to follow the basic protocols; wear a mask (properly of course), maintain social distancing, wash or disinfect your hands, both will be much better.
And why, you may ask. Because even if you are fully vaccinated there are still people who are not and you can still catch the virus. It is always good to err on the side of caution.
One of the main drivers for the surge in COVID-19 cases in Iloilo City is local transmission, meaning basic medical protocols are not followed.
You see people hanging on street corners/stores with their masks completely covering their chins unfortunately, not the mouths and nose, while some walking around without masks. Aand you’re wondering why COVID-19 cases are up, why people are still infected and dying?
Unless the natives of “I Am Iloilo City” take this seriously and follow these protocols properly, COVID-19-positive cases will just go up and down like a roller coaster ride. Mostly up.
These folks do not seem to understand that people are the vectors of the virus; meaning, without people it cannot move around on its own. They just have to attend baptism, wedding, birthday party, funeral wake, the cockfight and the despedida party. The irony is that if you get infected it is literally your despedida and funeral wake.
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And we talk about shit, yes literally shit.
A few days ago mainstream and social media was all about a GMA news report on a supposedly Chinese ship discharging shit in the “West Philippine Sea”.
Of course, most discerning folks took it with a grain of salt and researched to validate the GMA “news item” as it smells funny.
As expected, right on cue the usual suspects, the wokes, the “devotees to the cult of the yellow ribbon” and the rest of the three percent swallowed everything hook line and sinker because it is a perfect fit to their anti-China narrative and the perfect shit to throw against President Duterte.
In a statement, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said:
“We have taken note of the news circulating online about the alleged dumping of waste in the South China Sea. However, the photo of a ship seen dumping waste accompanying the report was found to have been taken in the Australian Great Barrier Reef in 2014,” Lorenzana said in his updated statement.
“Therefore, this intent to mislead has cast great doubt on the accurateness of the Simularity Report,” he added.
Excerpts from the July 16, 2021 column on The Manila Times by Rigoberto Tiglao:
Simularity CEO Elizabeth Derr in a Zoom conference on July 12, 2021 (on the anniversary of the arbitral ruling) hosted by former Foreign Affairs secretary Albert del Rosario announced that Chinese ships were dumping human feces in the South China Sea “so much you can see it in space.”
The satellite photos weren’t really convincing of such a claim and third-party validation is required for its interpretations, first, if these were indeed Chinese ships second, and more importantly, if Simularity’s interpretation that these were human waste was accurate. And third, as all scientific projects have, there should be a “control group” of satellite photos of non-China ships elsewhere, if they have or have not such waste appearing in the images.
What Simularity did that roused anger against China both here and internationally was that accompanying that claim was of a ship trailed with brown-colored material which anybody seeing it would have retched as it looks like human feces.
An alert netizen however reverse-searched the photo and discovered that it was an image of an unidentified ship dumping waste in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in 2014.
At the end of the day, we all know that this anti-China shit is really aimed against President Duterte. (brotherlouie16@gmail.com)/PN
