BY MATÈ ESPINA
AFTER months of advocacy to sign-up for the COVID-19 vaccination program, people are starting to listen, some even panicking, now that they are seeing hundreds, including friends and family, submitting themselves for inoculation.
Metro cities, especially in the National Capital Region (NCR), are way ahead of us since they were prioritized due to the number of cases. But since Monday, the Bacolod city government has started mass vaccination as well for senior citizens and persons with comorbidities.
SM City Bacolod offered to be the venue and I went there with two elderly relatives in tow for their scheduled vaccination. It was breezy and although the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) only allocated 200 in their list, they exceeded the number and at the end of the day, 291 got jabs.
With the media coverage, the EOC found themselves inundated with more people lining up the following days and come Tuesday, 433 got vaccinated, 466 on Wednesday and over 480 by Thursday.
It was more than what the vaccination teams can handle and after Mayor Bing Leonardia visited the venue last Thursday, the EOC revisited their protocols and suspended the vaccination at SM City while they recoup. The team will transfer to the nearby Ayala Mall but limited to only 200 patients in the priority list and only those who got communication from the EOC will be accommodated.
City Administrator Em Ang who also heads the EOC said they will reopen the SM vaccine center on Monday and will resume until there are vaccines left. She said that they are hoping additional vaccines promised by the National Interagency Task Force (NIATF) will arrive soon.
Em said they are glad of the turnout because it means people are now accepting the idea that vaccination is the only way to attain normalcy especially that cases continue to rise in this part of the region.
In fact, quarantine facilities in the province are getting filled up so fast that there is a request again to seek for a travel moratorium. There too is the issue of peace and order as 90 police personnel are now in isolation because of COVID-19.
Em said the city is also starting to open up schools to accommodate new positives. A city councilor was in critical condition at the start of the week but is said to be responding to medicines. His wife, a cancer survivor, was also infected.
A sister of my close friend died early this week and post mortem swab revealed she was positive of the virus. Thursday night, another close friend asked for prayers after he also tested positive. My cousin’s entire family is in one of the hotels converted into a quarantine facility here.
As I am writing this, we got a message in our Rotary club group chat that one of our members who was stricken with COVID-19 over a week ago, just passed away. Lucille’s last message to us was Wednesday when she informed us that she was very hopeful she was on her way to recovery.
Lucille had asthma and a heart condition but told us that all interventions in the hospital had been made and her x-ray result was improving. She was hoping to be released soon. Thursday, a friend messaged her and although she ‘seen’ it, she did not reply. Friday, we were told she was gone.
It’s shocking how fast the turn-around was. The virus was just much stronger than what her body can withstand. It used to be statistics, now these are people we know getting stricken and dying in our midst. It’s so sad and maddening that many people continue to think COVID-19 is nothing.
Em said, and I believe too, that part of the reason why many people are starting to scramble for vaccines is because of the scare that’s happening in India where people die unattended because the hospitals are overwhelmed. Funeral pyres in open spaces keep on burning as thousands die on a daily basis.
India has inoculated over 14 million of their population but because they are over a billion and the virus is said to be airborne already, their daily cases are in the hundreds of thousands.
Back here at home, some towns and cities in the province are also starting to inoculate their frontliners and those in the priority list but the supplies are really limited. Those in the private sector who were hoping their companies can provide for them ahead of the pack, have started registering in LGU centers seeing that red tape is causing all the delay in their own procurement of vaccines.
A news report in BBC said that around the world, an estimated 160 million people have been vaccinated but most of these are in the US and Europe. It cited a study by the Economist Intelligence Unit saying the Philippines may see itself fully covered by 2023 yet.
Government is largely to be blamed for the state we are in now. The delay in procurement, the messaging it sends out and then a president who sets an example of violating protocols by getting jabbed with Sinopharm vaccine which has not been approved yet.
It’s a repeat of that time when presidential guards got inoculated with vaccines that were considered smuggled. When you have leadership like that, I think the study that we may be fully covered by 2023 is quite optimistic./PN
