How we wish there was a much bigger issue to write about. But last Friday, the Dumaguete community was greeted with the sad news that a medical doctor, who had been active not only in the hospitals but in critical issues facing the community, succumbed to CoViD and other co-morbidities.
For our local medical frontliners, the sudden death of our good doctor brought a chilling reminder of the real hazards of their jobs. Day after day, they face the risk of contracting the virus as they perform their sworn duty to help the sick to the best of their ability and judgment.
True, vaccination may not be a guarantee against infection but according to the Food and Drug Administration, most of the vaccinated individuals who do get CoViD are reported to suffer mild to moderate cases.
FDA Director General Eric Domingo said the probability of a person dying from CoViD goes down, after the second dose of the vaccine.
A recent FDA study of 20,863,544 partially- and fully-vaccinated individuals found that a total of 735 persons have so far been infected with CoViD-19, while 61 deaths (0.0003 percent) have been recorded on its VigiFlow system as of Aug. 1 this year.
Compare that with the 607 deaths in Negros Oriental, out of the 18,876 CoViD cases that we’ve had since last year until Nov. 12, giving us 3.2 deaths for every 100 mostly-unvaccinated patients.
Do vaccines work? Just do the math.
Unfortunately, we live in a Province that is the current topnotcher in terms of having the highest number of CoViD-19 active cases.
Negros Oriental has four-digit figures of CoViD-positive cases, while our three neighboring provinces have theirs in three-digits. And the rest are consistently decreasing, while we are not.
It’s a no-brainer, though. Just go around this small town on an ordinary day, or during the weekends, and see how people go about their business like it were the pre-pandemic days. And we wonder how other LGUs are able to keep their figures down, while we remain on top?
Some conspiracy theorists abound, suggesting that the CoViD issue is being used to postpone the elections; but we don’t want to consider that at the moment.
We just pray for the enlightenment of our so-called CoViD managers that our objective is supposed to bring the cases down, not the other way around.
