‘One wonders if alarm bells are ringing in the heads of our decision makers. Judging by the recent pronouncements, it seems like the strategy is just to deflect blame on everyone else except themselves for this poor response to the pandemic.’
IT has been, to the day, one year and 15 days after government declared the lockdown of the country. But instead of finding ourselves in a better situation pandemic-wise, it seems that we are exactly where we were back in March 2020. Hospitals are at full capacity. The new case count released by the Department of Health is getting more terrifying by the day — we are now breaching 10,000 new cases.
How many of you, dear millennials and fillennials, have heard of the passing of friends, family, and acquaintances in the past few weeks? I have heard too many stories of people I know getting infected, and having a difficult time getting themselves or their loved ones admitted into hospitals. The few doctors I know have been posting warnings about how overwhelmed the hospitals they serve are — and these are just from my own feed. I asked a few more people to get a better sense of their situation, and the observation is the same.
It seems that government has learned nothing from all we have been through in the past year. The arrival of the donated vaccines, as well as the dogged ability of our health care workers to keep our healthcare system running has perhaps lulled government into a false sense of complacency — you see this with the idiotic proposals to open the economy when we were clearly not out of the woods yet, without even a thought of providing guidance and assistance to business that wanted to open safely. The ever-changing rules make it hard for those who want to do business to actually comply, and business owners have been absorbing all sorts of costs just to keep up.
As a former colleague of mine is fond of saying, hope is not a plan if you are in government. Hope cannot be operationalized. And our government’s response to the worsening situation is to impose a haphazard lockdown — with incomplete details of new regulations, a vague promise of “ayuda” to those affected — just adds to the mounting frustration of those who just want to survive this pandemic.
We are still not testing enough people, and a year later, we still have a very flimsy excuse for contact tracing. Both have been shown to be effective measures in stemming the spread of the infection, as evidenced by countries like Vietnam and Taiwan. Somehow, these best practices have either been ignored by those in power, or they are just not equipped (despite loaning massive amounts of money, asking for emergency powers) to execute and implement these measures. You decide which is which.
One wonders if alarm bells are ringing in the heads of our decision makers. Judging by the recent pronouncements, it seems like the strategy is just to deflect blame on everyone else except themselves for this poor response to the pandemic. One also wonders how long they can keep this up, or perhaps more accurately — how long will the people have to suffer these circumstances exacerbated by ineptitude. We cannot keep waking up to this recurring nightmare, folks.
