Malacañang’s announcement on Thursday that Negros island will be under a less stringent General Community Quarantine (GCQ) starting Friday, May 1st was a breath of fresh air for many.
The ECQ, where people were forced to stay inside their homes, may have been a great help in the decrease in the number of people with CoViD 19-like symptoms.
We have officially had no new CoViD-19 incidents in the past two or three weeks. And we thank our health workers for their dedication and outspokenness in calling attention to the danger lurking in our communities.
The ECQ also came with a heavy price. Thousands of people, especially workers earning daily wages, lost their livelihood.
Not a few went hungry, and angry over their seeming helplessness in dealing with the situation.
But such is the danger of the CoViD-19 pandemic–we do not know where it is, we do not know who could be carrying it, we do not know who could be transmitting it.
All we do know is that if we have to stop this virus, we have to stop circulating.
Now, with the General Community Quarantine that will start this Friday, people are entertaining a number of ideas about what they would want to immediately do — thinking everything will be back to normal.
Sadly, it won’t. We won’t be back to normal — until a vaccine against the coronavirus is found.
We could not be living anymore like we were back in normal times.
This, they say, is the “new normal”, where handshakes and cheek buzzes may already be things of the past, where everyone would still be required to wear facemasks, as large gatherings will continue to be prohibited.
The new challenge these days is self-sufficiency. We must find ways to grow our own food.
Government assistance will never be enough so it would be wise not to depend on it for our personal/family needs.
Let’s make the best of the General Community Quarantine by finding new opportunities to feed ourselves. In doing so, we help ease the pressure on government to produce cash which otherwise could have gone to other services.
