The election virus is dominant

“Despite the pandemic, we still engage in our favorite national pastime—politics.”

With election fever spreading like a conflagration, it’s unbelievable how many of us tend to lose grasp of the reality of the threat of a more devastating local coronavirus epidemic similar to those that have killed hundreds of thousands in India, Brazil and other countries.

Watching news reports on the strife-torn Afghanistan, it’s difficult to imagine how Afghan women, children and the elderly survive with the lack of food, shelter and medical help for those infected with COVID-19, thousands of whom have reportedly died in recent months.

So, it just crossed my mind how lucky we are to have the luxury of engaging in our “national sport” of politics amid the worst surge of COVID cases in nearly two years.

Ironically, while the debate in the political arena revolves around the government’s response to the worsening COVID crisis, it has all boiled down to personal attacks against each other.

Apparently, Philippine politics has again reared its ugly head with prospective candidates getting into more like a mud-wrestling free-for-all with eight months left before the May 2022 polls.

It’s amazing how fascinated Filipinos are with elections just like how we become fixated on  every spectacular Pacquiao fight.

In fact, we are more than fascinated as we are excited, impassioned, intrigued, angry, hateful, and frustrated, depending on who we support, what our expectations are and how things turn out as we get closer to the polls.

The 2022 elections virus seems to have come over many of us that mounting COVID cases, the advent of the more dangerous Delta variant and rising death toll do not seem to matter anymore.

It’s a shame that many seem to have lost the sense of urgency, unmindfully ignoring and violating health standards and curfew hours.

And due to the worst-ever surge in COVID cases, the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) had to go back to the drawing board and decided to pilot the so-called “granular lockdown” beginning tomorrow.

We strongly hope that the IATF has finally figured out the solution to stop the community transmission and gradually reopen the economy.

The piloted granular lockdown includes selected areas, compound, neighborhood or barangay where there are reported clusters of active COVID-19 cases.

But total lockdown of any area without mass testing and contact tracing would be useless.

By year’s end, it will have been two years since infected Chinese tourists carried the coronavirus from its epicenter Wuhan City, Hubei, China to the Philippines.

Over the weekend, the country set record-high numbers of daily reported COVID-19 infections breaching the 20,000 tally for three consecutive days.

The Department of Health has repeatedly warned of the country’s inadequate healthcare facilities to accommodate the influx of patients.

Meanwhile, President Duterte said it is a “consolation” that most COVID patients recover for which he credited Health Secretary Francisco Duque, as well as for the “low COVID death toll” compared to other countries.

With a daily tally of 20,089 recoveries on Sunday, total recoveries rose to 1,889,312 which, in turn, is 91 percent of the grand total of 2,080,984 COVID cases.

Now, do these daily reported recoveries represent those actually admitted to the hospitals then sent home with a clean bill of health and get replaced with new patients, and so on?

As of Sunday, DOH Undersecretary Rosario Vergeire said 75 percent of the country’s 4,200 intensive care unit beds reserved for COVID-19 patients are occupied. This is a high-risk situation, particularly in the National Capital Region where COVID-19 ICU occupancy is at 75 percent of 1,500 beds in use.

DOH also said ward beds for COVID-19 patients nationwide and in NCR are also at high risk with 71 percent of the 15,400 ward beds nationwide in use while 73 percent of the 4,200 ward beds in NCR now being utilized.

So, where are these massive figures on recoveries being reported daily coming from when hospitals can hardly accommodate new COVID patients anymore?