‘Let us not forget: a staggering 4,000 deaths in a single month. Get the people vaccinated now, or step aside and let others do what you clearly can’t do.’
I CAREFULLY reviewed the data being issued by the Department of Health and properly broadcast by some media outfits, and was stunned.
Since the pandemic hit us in March of 2020, some 1,000 Filipinos were dying of COVID-19 officially per month till March of 2021, leading to a national tally of 13,000+ deaths as of April 1. By the way, I say “officially” because these were the deaths as reported by our hospitals. How many died at home or elsewhere and for one reason or another was not included in the tally, only God knows.
But as of May 1st the DOH reported that total official deaths from COVID to be a little over 17,000, meaning that from April 1 to 30, some 4,000 Filipinos, or four times the “usual” number, died of COVID – all within a span of 30 days. The month of April has thus accounted for about 23% of all deaths since the pandemic began last year. No wonder those dying were no longer strangers to us.
No matter how you slice it, 23% of total deaths being tallied in one month is a staggering number. It is the result of the surge that we saw that has left most of the coveted hospitals
in our urban areas filled to capacity up to today. While that surge seems to have abated a little, thanks to numbers again being reported by the DOH, the fact that those numbers are incomplete thanks to the failure of some labs to submit their reports should give you pause.
Are we really over the hump of that Q1 surge? Or is the virus just taking one step back before surging forward again?
We cannot afford a third wave. We might see even double the April numbers of deaths if we are hit by a new wave. Especially since most of the key hospitals in and around an urban center like Metro Manila remain almost full to the brim.
(Except one: the National Center for Mental Health, in Mandaluyong. Its COVID ward, I am told, is only 22% full. But then again I would hesitate going there to be admitted; how would I know if the doctor attending to me is a real doctor and not a patient who dressed up as a doctor?)
The only way we can beat back a third surge is to get as many people fully vaccinated as possible. And experts set the number required to be 70% of the population as your bare minimum in order to achieve herd immunity. For a country like the Philippines with a 100+ million population, that means inoculating 70 million with two doses of your COVID vaccine.
As of this writing some 320,000 Filipinos have been fully vaccinated. That’s about 0.5% of the total minimum number that has to be jabbed. Critics have pointed out that at the rate we are going we will need from seven to 10 years before the herd immunity population threshold number is reached. But there won’t be any herd immunity.
Since achieving herd immunity by Christmas now appears more and more unlikely to happen, government has now changed its line again: achieve herd immunities in the urban areas. That will require vaccinating a little over 50 million. All you’ll need to vaccinate now, we are told, is some 50+ million instead of the 70+ million.
It’s a good way to play around with numbers; you’ll now only need to find 100 million doses of vaccines for 50 million people instead of 140 million doses for 70 million people.
Of course, the government has always been saying it will achieve herd immunity by Christmas; by narrowing now the focus to urban areas only, the government in effect is admitting that it won’t meet its target and has chosen to treat non-urban areas as of secondary importance.
The idea of focusing mainly on urban areas scares me, even if as an urbanite I will qualify for two jabs. The reason is simple: even if you fully vaccinate 50 million urbanites by yearend (which I am willing to bet they will not be able to do) leaving 50 million others unvaccinated is like providing the virus a playing ground in which to mutate into local variants.
By playing around with these numbers government is playing around with our lives.
Let us not forget: a staggering 4,000 deaths in a single month. Get the people vaccinated now, or step aside and let others do what you clearly can’t do.
