"Just make the trains run on time."
As of yesterday, “NCR+” (to include the capital region’s four surrounding provinces) has been placed again under ECQ. The restrictions are gloomily familiar: stay home except when buying food or medicines; churches and restaurants shut down; a lengthy curfew from 6PM to 5AM.
Nonetheless, experience seems to be making us better at this quarantine business. Public transportation will remain somewhat open; quarantine passes aren’t needed; cash support is promised within the month. And now, unlike the last time, we can fall back on vaccinations, which government will roll out simultaneously across the top priority groups (health workers, seniors, and folks with co-morbidities).
With any luck, the ECQ may ease up by Easter Sunday. Then again, it may not. It’ll depend, again, on how well we follow instructions.
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In this season of mortification, one might reflect on how future historians may refer to this prolonged global pandemic as “The Great Humbling.”
It has brought low rich and poor alike, with no regard for social status or gender. Inexplicably, it’s sparing only children and younger teen-agers. And it’s attacking wealthy and impoverished nations alike, with but one exception that also remains unexplained.
The exception is that death rates are generally (though not always) so much higher in North America and Europe, compared to Asia and Africa. The death rate in the Philippines, laggard though it may be compared to its neighbors (except Indonesia), is only 1/20th of the death rate in the United States, the preferred destination of our immigrants.
Various reasons have been adduced for this: weather (the virus can’t thrive in sunny or hot weather); diet (Westerners are too well-fed for their own good); sociology (the elderly in the West are crowded into nursing homes where infection easily spreads); even culture (the don’t-fence-me-in individualists of the West don’t like being told what to do, like wearing masks, while Asians are readier to obey authority).
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Unfortunately for us, at some point, the financial and logistical superiority of being a developed country just has to catch up. At its current vaccination rate, the US may hit 70 percent “herd immunity” before this year-end. By comparison, we’ll be lucky to hit the same milestone of herd immunity by the end of NEXT year.
That one-year difference measures the gulf between what we like to boast about and what we end up actually accomplishing. It can be bridged to a large extent by national leaders who micro-manage, who wield an unsparing whip. But it can never be closed that way, and we won’t always be lucky enough to be led by micro-managers.
In the end, we have to look deep inside ourselves—into our character, into the kinds of structures we’ve allowed to be erected around us on account of our character. It’s not a pretty sight. Next May, when we elect our next president, maybe what we ought to look for is simply someone who can make the trains run on time. Whoever convinces me they can do that, they’ll have my vote.
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As I’m writing this, another debate is also raging on social media, this time about the anti-COVID merits and demerits of the animal drug ivermectin. Reputable doctors are lined up on both sides of the issue, so how do we laymen decide?
The local healthcare industry association HCAAP has taken a Solomonic stance by reminding everyone that there are over seventy medical trials now on-going with ivermectin. The trial period is just one month, so we should be getting the results within a few weeks.
While waiting for those results, I think people should be allowed to buy this new “wonder drug.” That’s being consistent with the position of the US National Institutes of Health that they’re “neither for nor against” it. At worst, it’s a placebo that eases people’s minds with no appreciable long-term damage (so long as people continue to observe the familiar protocols). And at best—who knows?—the darn thing might just work.
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In today’s Gospel (John 13: 36-38), Peter offers an example of how far what one promises can be from what one actually does. When he protests to Jesus that “I will lay down my life for you,” Jesus calmly puts him in his place: “Amen, amen, I say to you, the cock will not crow before you deny me three times.”
This is a well-known vignette from the Passion narrative that illustrates the fundamental weakness of human ambition, no matter how well-intentioned. In the end, when faced by the unexpected terrors of reality and the limitations of our own nature, we often fall apart.
Only by God’s grace are we given to recover—if not to achieve what we want, then certainly to learn the inescapability of our dependence on Him. Only in such humility can we leave the humiliation of failure behind, pick ourselves up and move on.
Readers can write me at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com.