"How come more generals are employed than scientists, when the issue is science, not security?"
"How come more generals are employed than scientists, when the issue is science, not security?"The following is the second part of my column last Friday, April 24, 2020:
Seven, under the Bayanihan Heal as One Act, Republic Act 11469 of March 23, 2020, the President of the Philippines has the power to “ensure the availability of credit to productive sectors of the economy especially in the countryside, through measures such as, but not limited to, lowering the effective lending rates of interest and reserve requirement of lending institutions.”
Under the same Act, the President can “direct all banks, quasi-banks, financing companies, lending companies, and other financial institutions, public and private, including the Government Service Insurance System, the Social Security System and Pag-IBIG, to implement a minimum of a 30-day grace period for the payment of all loans, including but not limited to salary, personal, housing, and motor vehicle loans, as well as credit card payments, falling due within the period of the Enhanced Community Quarantine without incurring interests, penalties, fees and other charges…”
The interest that need not be paid by borrowers of the commercial banking system if this law were applied to the letter would have been P73 billion for one month of no-interest payment.
However, in the DOF’s implementing rules and regulations, what was waived as interest was only the interest on the P73-billion interest. Assuming annual interest of 8 percent, the waived interest on interest would only be P480 million.
Borrowers lost P73 billion. The banks saved P72.52 billion—P73 billion minus P480 million. The banks made P72.l52 billion in windfall profits.
This P72.52 billion should now be given out by the banks as additional loans to MSMEs.
Eight, there are four Ts—to cope with the coronavirus: Testing, Tracing contacts or those possibly infected by COVID-19 patients; Treatment, and Trust.
The Department of Health cannot get a passing grade for all four Ts.
To do honest-to-goodness testing, the Philippines must scale up testing to the level of 10,000 tests a day.
Wuhan, the epicenter of the original COVID-19 outbreak, has a population of 11 million, one-fifth of the population of Luzon. Yet, they conducted 10,000 tests daily. The Philippines, after 38 days of lockdown, has conducted 60,000 tests—the equivalent of six days.
Wuhan also deployed 1,800 contact tracing teams; each team had five members. These teams traced tens of thousands of people every day. They did nothing but trace the people who might have been in contact with the patient infected with COVID-19. These people included relatives, friends, colleagues, anyone who might have been within six feet of the infected.
The Chinese record is 99 to 100 percent of contacts were traced. Most of those contacted had to be tested. And one to five percent of the tested contacts were found positive for COVID-19.
Treatment refers to Manila having at least 100,000 new hospital beds. This is to treat the COVID-19 patients and to quarantine suspects whose COVID-19 is not yet confirmed. So far, only about 6,000 new hospital beds have been assembled.
We also need easily 300,000 additional medical personnel—doctors, nurses, assistants, and cleaning crews. We don’t have them.
And then Trust—do you trust the DOH under Secretary Duque to bring us to the plateau, with curve bended or flattened so we can return to normalcy?
Basic to having the four Ts is having the science behind the coronavirus. Where are our scientists? What do they say about the pandemic and its course? How come more generals are employed than scientists, when the issue is science, not security?
Nine. According to the Joint WHO-China Report on the Wuhan Coronavirus Epidemic, the coronavirus was first discovered on Dec. 30, 2019 when samples were taken from a patient with pneumonia of unknown origin, at the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital. The virus had 96 percent similarity with the SARS coronavirus strain from bats.
Symptoms of COVID-19 are non-specific and the disease presentation can range from no symptoms (asymptomatic) to severe pneumonia and death. As of Feb. 20, 2020 and based on 55,924 laboratory confirmed cases, typical signs and symptoms include: fever (87.9 percent), dry cough (67.7 percent), fatigue (38.1 percent), sputum production (33.4 percent), shortness of breath (18.6 percent), sore throat (13.9 percent), headache (13.6 percent), myalgia or arthralgia (14.8 percent), chills (11.4 percent), nausea or vomiting (5.0 percent), nasal congestion (4.8 percent), diarrhea (3.7 percent), and hemoptysis (0.9 percent), and conjunctival congestion (0.8 percent).
People with COVID-19 generally develop signs and symptoms, including mild respiratory symptoms and fever, on an average of 5-6 days after infection (mean incubation period 5-6 days; range 1-14 days).
Most people infected with COVID-19 virus have mild disease and recover. Approximately 80 percent of laboratory confirmed patients have had mild to moderate disease, which includes non-pneumonia and pneumonia cases.
Mortality increases with age. The crude fatality ratio (CFR) is 21.9 percent for people over 80. If you have no other diseases (what they call comorbidity), the CFR is only 1.4 percent. Patients with cardiovascular diseases have CFR of 13.2 percent; diabetes 9.2 percent; hypertension 8.4 percent; chronic respiratory disease 8 percent; and cancer 7.6 percent.
Recovery for mild cases is two weeks; three to six weeks for patients with severe or critical disease. A critical patient could die within one week. In China, of those who died, the period from first appearance of symptoms to the time a patient dies could be two weeks to eight weeks.
Ten, the coronavirus has no brain, is invisible, and is a dead matter.
It operates by denying you that one thing which made Nike best selling and famous Air. You die of COVID-19 because the virus denies you oxygen. The oxygen level in your blood plummets and you cannot breathe. You are connected to a ventilator. Still, many die.
Please note, the world has been conquered by a speck of matter that has no brain and is even dead, defeating the combined brain power of 7.8 billion people on earth.
How does the coronavirus do it? Well, it is smart. It kills only five percent of its victims, leaving each of the 95 to go on infecting two to four other people each of which in turn will infect two to four other people on their own. Hence, the pandemic.
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