"Many have failed to abide by the rules on social distancing."
Most of us are literally struggling with how the prevailing public health crisis, which compelled a nationwide community quarantine, has adversely affected our activities of daily living, livelihood, career, family and social life.
The “enhanced community quarantine” or, simply, lockdown is indeed a bitter pill to swallow but it is an imperative which I personally think should have been imposed days earlier. I do not mean to second-guess President Duterte but it’s something that his advisers should have seen coming, in view of the COVID-19 outbreak across the globe.
Thanks to the President’s decisiveness and political will, he placed the whole Metro Manila on community quarantine on the recommendation of the Inter-Agency-Task Force headed by Department of Health (DOH) Secretary Francisco Duque.
This extreme measure may have had some good effects, as well as it may have deterred a wider spread of the coronavirus.
Owing to the suspension of public transportation and the massive shift to work-from-home by public and private offices, there has been less vehicular traffic on the road and, therefore, less air pollution.
With the loss or lessened income, particularly for those wage earners under “no work, no pay” condition, a tighter budget management and frugality is a must.
Best of all, homebound parents and children have found time for family bonding, encouraging each other to observe personal preventive measures to avoid contracting coronavirus.
Unfortunately, it is in the rule on social distancing that we have failed to abide by miserably in many neighborhoods.
There have been persistent reports of rampant loitering, gathering and hanging out, gossiping and engage in public drinking to while away time. This is in utter disregard of the health authorities’ repeated warning against person-to-person transmission of COVID-19.
Obviously, it hasn’t hit home for a number of our kababayan, including their barangay officials, that the sooner we get our act together the sooner we may get out of the situation.
Barangay captains and other officials who refuse or fail to enforce community quarantine rules must face stiff sanctions by the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG). As Manong Digong said during his declaration of the state of national public health emergency, those barangay captains who do not take the COVID-19 crisis seriously might as well resign their posts.
There have also been reports of some barangay officials charging residents fees for securing their community quarantine ID or pass that a member of the family must carry when going out to the store to buy food and other necessities.
It is high time to teach these violators and the barangay officials a serious lesson about the seriousness of the predicament we’re all in.
Those barangay quarantine violators, especially during curfew hours, who are found loitering, drinking in public and engage in illegal gambling should be spend their quarantine time behind bars or be compelled to perform duties like disinfecting their neighborhood.
They must be made to actively help preventing further spread of the deadly unseen contagion. They should help seek out those possible COVID-19 patients in need of testing and treatment instead hanging out and exposing themselves to infection.
We must be thankful that current conditions in the country’s localities are not as bad as those abroad, such as Italy, China, Iran, Spain and Korea where thousands die from COVID-19 each day.