If we go by the numbers of CoViD cases in Manila, it won’t be long before we here in Negros Oriental would be facing another surge.
And it portends to be the more transmissible variant, even though our laboratories are reluctant to submit samples to the National Genome Center for confirmation.
But this isn’t entirely a surprise. We have seen it coming last year, noting the rise and fall of cases in the country, and worse, throughout the world.
We seem to have prepared for this as well — if the cleaned-out stocks of paracetamol at our local drug stores are any indication.
While we saw it coming, however, many of us are leaving our fate to chance, neglecting the need for social distancing, and wearing masks below the chin.
Ironically, our vaccination centers look like low-hanging fruits for the virus to mutate.
One person who got his booster eventually got CoViD even after being OC about exercising all precautions and health protocols; the only place he could have been infected with the virus was at the vaccination center, ironically, where he had waited for three hours to get his booster, all the while lining up within close distance of each other, with other vaccine recipients.
There also are long tight queues at the disaster relief centers in the northern towns and cities of the Province, which could be fertile grounds for CoViD in the following days. It’s the same situation outside banks, where people line up closely to each other.
We hope the local government units would not have to be battling CoViD alongside disaster relief operations. For now, it seems to be a probability with a big amount of certainty.
CoViD could continue to hound us this year, and there may even be more variants that will be discovered. The numbers in Negros Oriental, which double each week, are telling us what the future could be like.
We should be under Alert Level 3 starting Jan. 16. Does this mean anything to you and me? Or do we continue doing the same things we are doing now, and expecting a different result?
Albert Einstein had said something about that. “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity.”
What is much more widespread than actual stupidity is playing stupid, turning a blind eye, refusing to see what is actually happening; turning a deaf ear, refusing to listen to counsel from the medical frontliners.
We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The CoViD protocols have been proven to work. We only have to follow them.
