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Friday, March 29, 2024

Stumbling into GCQ

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"Wear masks. Wash hands. Keep your distance. We shouldn’t need to be perpetually reminded by our government to do these."

Yesterday, Metro Manila joined much of the rest of the country in relaxing its Covid-prompted lockdown to general community quarantine (GCQ) status. This opens up a lot more of the economy and public spaces, although public transportation and schools are still shut down together with seniors like me. Thankfully the barber shops will also reopen next week and I can finally get rid of four months of hair growth. We can only hope that the authorities will soon give as much importance to churches as they do to barber shops.

The relaxation comes at an inopportune time in terms of the health stats we’ve gotten used to following. The curve of daily new incidents is nowhere near flat, and in fact there was a recent spike of new incidents, exceeding a thousand in one day. The Department of Health hastily explained that the spike was just a backlog of older test results that had not yet been reported and finally entered the system. This may be true, but it certainly doesn’t encourage confidence in the integrity of the entire curve itself, whether conceptually or the way it’s been tracked and reported the last several months.

The death rate is, thankfully, still a lot lower than in many other countries, including some of our neighbors in the region. Assuming all the Covid fatalities are being properly reported, the credit for this can’t go solely to the lockdown—a brutal though necessary measure—nor to the capabilities of our healthcare infrastructure, which were never high to begin with–as witness the unusually high mortality rate among our own doctors and nurses.

For our low death rate, we may also have to thank our environment—hot and sunny weather—as well as the painfully earned high immunity levels of our urban poor. Having grown up in squalid conditions, crowded into each other, the emerging hypothesis is that our people developed immunities against which even the Covid virus must contend. We’ve been talking a lot lately about herd immunity, when in fact it’s something that we all unknowingly already developed while growing up in this country. When we look at the raging death rates in the West, in Europe and the US, whose citizens have spent their lives coddled and cossetted, maybe we should thank our native, home-grown viruses.

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As we cross over from MECQ into GCQ, it doesn’t feel like we’re breaking a ribbon at the finish line of a sprint race, arms held high. It feels a lot more like we’re stumbling through the door from one desolate room to another less lonesome. This is a feeling we may have to get used to for a long while.

The only positive we can be sure of is that our health system has improved a lot under the crisis—specifically in terms of testing, isolation, and treatment, though not yet in contact tracing, at least until government finally gets together with the telcos and mobile app developers to digitize the entire process.

We now expect with confidence to hit the stretch target of 30,000 tests per day sometime in June. There seem to be enough quarantine facilities already set up, enough even to handle a growing influx of dislocated OFWs. Already some people are starting to talk about totally randomized mass testing, perhaps because they think we already have more than enough testing equipment and materials to handle only persons of interest, i.e. starting with asymptomatic persons who had a potentially infectious travel history.

Luckily, that was always the objective anyway. We locked down our people primarily to enable our healthcare system to catch up, and only secondarily to protect or treat them for the virus. If we keep that in mind, we can feel better about what we had to give up during the lockdown, whether it was our personal freedoms or the costs to a now enfeebled economy.

But the same numbers of people are still getting infected, or even dying, out there. The virus is still very much alive and kicking. As relaxation sets in, this sobering reality is sinking in among many of us, those who’re now posting online that GCQ means “get cremated quickly.” The same people who used to be screaming about the injustice, or the imperfections, of the lockdown are now thinking twice before leaving their houses, now that they’re allowed to freely do so.

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What’s particularly galling to me is a common theme that’s going around: under GCQ, allegedly, “bahala na kayo sa buhay niyo.” This reflects a couple of peculiar conceits of popular Filipino thinking: one, that we are somehow not ultimately the ones responsible for our own lives; and two, that because of this, government is somehow always on the hook to look out for us.

These are conceits that the virus ought to help us unlearn. Nobody else is responsible for the lives we live—and that includes people like me who, of their own free will and volition, turn over that responsibility to God. And because of that, there are limits to what we ought to expect from government. Strictly speaking, those limits are set by the amount of taxes we pay in to support government. Beyond that, we risk giving up for the promise of eternal government largesse our right to complain about government infringing on our freedoms, with or without lockdowns.

Wear masks. Wash hands. Keep your distance. We shouldn’t need to be perpetually reminded by our government to do these. Because we’re responsible not just for our own lives, but also for the lives of others by the way we use—or abuse—our personal freedoms, these simple reminders, post-GCQ, ought to come habitually and unthinkingly to us.

Readers can write me at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com.

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