‘Two weeks can be an eternity for those who depend on daily earnings to fill their stomachs and those of their loved ones…’
A FEW days ago, I woke up at 4:30 a.m. for my thrice a week “fun run.” This fun run, which I started doing for the first time in my life last year, at age 57, is a high intensity interval training that sees me walk fast and then run as fast as I can and then switch back to walking and then running again in alternate fashion around a triangular block that measures 0.5 kms all around.
I never liked running. I used to cramp often. But in March last year, with gyms closed and people stuck in their homes, there was nothing else to do. I also told myself “this would be a good way to keep COVID at bay.”
I was prophetic in a way.
Long and short of it, after almost a year of HIIT three times a week, I did come down with COVID. Bad. But somehow 13 days after I was admitted to the emergency room of a leading hospital in BGC (I don’t want this to be seen as plug for St. Luke’s) I was unpacking my stuff back at home. Three months of follow-ups ensued, focused on my pulmonary recovery; but early on it was already clear even to my pulmo specialist that I was in a far, far better shape post COVID than many other survivors.
It was the HIIT that saved me, I think, and that is why two weeks after being discharged, I resumed my routine. In fact, I’ve even upped the bar by going from 3 kilometers (6 laps) to 5 kilometers. It still is a good way to keep COVIC at bay.
For a few days, however, the “habagat” forced me to take my routine indoors. Luckily, the gym at the penthouse of the building where I live had reopened with strict rules on capacity and masking, and so I was able to do my HIIT on a treadmill even while it was raining cats and dogs outside. HIIT meant speeding up for, say, a minute then slowing down for a minute-and-a-half before speeding up again and so on until I reached the distance I wanted.
Doing HIIT on a treadmill strikes me as akin to our lockdown swings — from ECQ to MECQ to GCQ and then to MGCQ and then back up to ECQ again. With the treadmill HIIT the goalposts are clear: a certain time limit for some, a certain distance for others, and for others still a certain distance covered in a shorter time limit.
Somehow, we can say the same for our lockdown swings: the time is set (2 weeks in this case starting August 6) and the objective is clear — to lower the number of cases and the R numbers so that we know that the rate of spread of the virus is slowed.
We cannot afford to have another surge similar to what we had earlier this year, the same one that got me down. Despite 8 or so million Filipinos already fully vaccinated, the new COVID variant called Delta is far more infectious and, in some cases, even defies the immunity given by some vaccines.
The good news is that if those vaccinated are the ones who get infected, more often than not their infections are not of the severe type that will require intubation and all that; many if not most may even be asymptomatic. The bad news is that we should expect infection numbers to rise before they eventually plateau and then fall.
Again, if the surge caused by Delta is as bad as the March-April surge then our hospitals will be turning people away again and a few unlucky ones will not even make it beyond their own residential gates. We have to brace ourselves even more If the surge is worse, not everyone has the luxury of working at home. Or practicing social distancing at home. Or just keeping sane at home. Two weeks can be an eternity for those who depend on daily earnings to fill their stomachs and those of their loved ones; all the more so because these two weeks are already on top of 500 or so days of lockdowns in one form or another.
But the stark reality is this: there is a killer out there that does not discriminate when choosing his victims. And with vaccine supply a constant problem coupled with a significant segment of the population opposed to vaccinations in the first place, what other choice does government have except to decree our “incarceration” in the hope of breaking the chain of infections that are the killer’s footprints on the way to his next victims.
Stay safe — and hope that this new ECQ will be good enough.