If one went outside on any given day, and if one only imagined that face masks were part of the human anatomy, one could easily come to the conclusion that everything is back to “normal.”
This is a stark departure from the situation exactly two years ago, when life as we knew it practically halted given the drastic measures implemented to contain the spread of the then-unfamiliar and mysterious coronavirus.
In March 2020, there was no public transportation, no office work aside from “essential” workers, no classes, no church services. Malls and other places of recreation were closed, and just to be sure, the sight of cops looking to arrest curfew violators became a fixture.
Two years hence, and several surges after, things are different, indeed.
The Department of Health has even stopped issuing daily bulletins that reflected the number of new COVID cases and deaths, because the numbers have been steadily declining. All areas in the country are deemed to be at minimal risk. Business and tourism are in full swing, and rightly so. Their protracted suspension has adversely affected our people and taken away the earning capacity of millions of Filipinos.
Meanwhile, schools are planning the gradual return to face-to-face instruction. This is a long-awaited development, because online and modular classes have resulted in a deterioration in the quality of learning and have exposed the gaps that plague our society.
More visibly, in the run-up to the May elections, Filipinos are going out of their houses to show their support for their candidates. In such rallies, even in outdoor spaces, physical distancing is impossible to observe.
But COVID remains. The trend may be encouraging here in our country, but elsewhere in the world, surges are happening and various containment measures are being implemented by different nations depending on the inclination of their leaders.
The possibility of a surge is always there, and we must not take comfort in today’s relative freedom. We can only hope that the succeeding variants will get progressively less potent, and that vaccination efforts become widespread and sustained. And then we can survive another crisis without resorting to measures that kill our systems in other ways.
In the meantime, let us hope that the lessons we learned in the past two years will serve as a guide in preparing not only for a possible surge but for other crises. Let us begin by choosing leaders who know the issues intimately and who have solid plans for dealing with them when they do come.