Lessons

"Unfortunately, this is what Secretary Duque and his boys at the Department of Health have been prone to doing."

Before we get distracted by the unprecedented move of Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano and the minimis Committee of the Whole initiative to grant a franchise (yes, it is a new franchise with a bit of an insertion in the expired one to include program distribution) to the giant ABS CBN network, we should get back and refocus ourselves on the main concern at hand: our united, Bayanihan-Heal-As-One response to the COVID-19 pandemic which continues to wreak havoc on our lives.

There will be time, as Cayetano himself said, to inquire into the whys, wherefores and other imponderables surrounding this new franchise which in the House version expires just before All Saints Day on October 31, 2020 and its Senate counterpart authored by the Minority Leader, Senator Franklin Drilon. In the Senate version, the franchise is set to expire on June 30, 2022.

These legislative maneuverings are part of a larger drama involving not just the network but the life of this administration which is now busily hitting every button to get our COVID-19 response on track while fending off all kinds of brickbats from people who should know better. Any way one looks at it, it is not right to dwell on this franchise at a time when we should be focused as one nation in getting ourselves out of the ill effects of the pandemic. For now, two months into the ECQ, we should be more interested in digesting certain lessons from this latest pandemic mirrored from the lessons learned, if any, from the deadliest outbreaks in history four of which, namely, Ebola, SARS-1, MERS and HIV, occurred just over the past three decades or so.

Studies made by a number of experts are eerily familiar. An essay by Roxanne Khamis in the publication WIRED entitled "The History of Pandemics Teaches Us Only That We Can't Be Taught" is instructive.

Noted Khamis: "But if past is prologue, then we are really bad at using the past as prologue. Five years ago, in the aftermath of a massive Ebola outbreak, epidemiologist Michael baker bemoaned the vital lessons that we'd clearly failed to learn from prior outbreaks of disease. In recent weeks, many others have been taking note of how plagues of swine flu and the like have somehow failed to yield more funding for pandemic preparedness…Some have drawn parallels between our foot dragging and denial of the Covid 19 crisis and the long delay in responding to the AIDS pandemic (Remember the advise of Health Secretary Duque early on that there was nothing to worry about and there was no health benefit in wearing a mask?). As Howard Markel, a physician and historian of science, wrote in WIRED, ".I feel like quoting Yogi Berra 'it's deja vu all over again,'albeit a nightmarish blend of several deja vus into one.." Why haven't there been more of them (people) spouting off about the lessons that they've learned? Or maybe more to the point, why hasn't anyone been listening?"

Khamis posits: "It may be that this impulse has been canceled by a greater drive, to leave the terrors of the past behind. Indeed, some historians suggest that doctors who served on the front lines of fighting Spanish flu were reluctant to talk about it in the years that followed. Quarantines and bans on public gatherings during that period may have further shrouded the extent of suffering, while traumatized survivors kept their stories to themselves. It seems likely that a similar reticence to share followed other, past pandemics, too, as it may again when this coronavirus plague is over.

"George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." But it’s already clear that our memories have been fading on a scale of weeks, not years or decades. George Gao, director-general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, lamented in a March interview with Science magazine that other countries didn’t adopt enough preventive measures sooner: “The big mistake in the U.S. and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren’t wearing masks.” Another useful guidance from the super-recent past in China would have been to set up temporary hospitals in non-medical buildings, as quickly as we could."

Khamis' notes on these lessons and why there has been such reluctance across borders including the most advanced countries finds resonance in a paper of renowned historian and social scientist Charles Rosenberg who, in crafting an account of the archetypal structure of an outbreak, noted that “epidemics unfold as social dramas in three acts.”

Said Rosenberg: “The earliest signs are subtle. Whether influenced by a desire for self-reassurance or a need to protect economic interests, citizens ignore clues that something is awry until the acceleration of illness and deaths forces reluctant acknowledgment.”

“Recognition launches the second act, in which people demand and offer explanations, both mechanistic and moral. Explanations, in turn, generate public responses. These can make the third act as dramatic and disruptive as the disease itself.”

“Epidemics eventually resolve, whether succumbing to societal action or having exhausted the supply of susceptible victims."

“Epidemics start at a moment in time, proceed on a stage limited in space and duration, follow a plot line of increasing revelatory tension, move to a crisis of individual and collective character, then drift toward closure.”

Rosenberg's outbreak frame coupled with what Khamis exclamatory noted that the history of pandemics teaches us only that we can't be taught is now, sadly, playing right before our eyes. Reluctance to admit then progressive revelations then messaging the evolving signs then negotiating public response then vigor and push, push, push until (sana naman hindi) fatigue, distraction and complacency set in is what we have been witness to. Amid increasingly acrimonious debates over life and livelihood, it will truly be a shameful blight on our collective conscience, if in the end we allow those who should be leading us to the promised land, as it were, shrug off things, listen only to their own voices and pass the blame to some others.

Unfortunately, this is what Secretary Duque and his boys at the Department of Health have been prone to doing when they simply noted the troubling errors in the data being issued by the agency as pointed out by the UP Resilience Team as "just one percent of the total."

What a…