BACK TO SQUARE ONE June 16, 2020

The city where I grew up in is now “upgraded” back to Enhanced Community Quarantine status.  And just when people have started getting inspired and motivated to be back to work, even if only on skeletal status, here come the hard lockdowns once again.

It is understandable that people’s blood pressures and stress levels have gone up a bit, with spirits and hopes turned sour.  What is difficult to accept is that this is all because it is not anybody’s but everybody’s fault.  While our governments are doing their best to say that they have given their utmost effort to control the virus, we see some of our administrators and implementers actually slipping up, doing the opposite, and getting infected too.  While we see many of our fellowmen getting terrorized into submission with all the mask-wearing, physical distancing and moment-by-moment hand-washing and disinfecting, we see many of them not really religiously doing it properly, especially inside their own homes and quarters.

Even in the world’s greatest nations, the curves we believe they have flattened turned out to be just plateaus, indicating that this wave of infections is taking an inordinately long time. When compared to the Spanish flu of 1918 that took two years for all its waves, we are still only half a year or so, and hence, no amount of credit or boasting can be claimed that there is a weakening of the spread, especially now that when compared to 102 years ago, urban areas have clearly much more people and with worse sanitation than at the time of our ancestors.

Does this mean that the metrics our health experts and government officials used to assess the pandemic and the resultant opening and easing of economies were not really that reliable?  For one, I do have a beef with the word “quarantine” itself, which really means 40 days according to Merriam-Webster, but how come infected people or those suspected of being so, only get isolated for 14 days, and hence may risk infecting others even before determining with certainty whether they are sick or contagious or not? It’s obvious we lack the proper contingency planning and political will to marshall sufficient resources to implement these properly.

Maybe too, we have failed to really learn the lessons of past pandemics and have become complacent in believing that such things will not affect us at the scale we see it now.  But hey, what do we know, sickness and death are knocking at the door, or just 1 meter away.

This reminds me of today’s Word of our Lord in the gospel of Luke, chapter 6, verses 46 to 49, when He compared the wise and foolish builders as the people who both listen to His teachings, but one listened well and acted upon them, while the other one did not act on them.  We all remember the story, how the house made by the wise builder withstood the flood since it was built upon the rock, while the one made by the foolish builder was destroyed, or as the King James Version states, “...and the ruin of that house was great.”

Maybe then, every moment from here and now that we are still alive, we need to take stock of what we did wrong, evaluate what we missed, plan for and act promptly on those things we should have done better, in order to secure our people’s health and safety.  Many apprehensive parties I know would have clucked their tongues at what is happening now, and will tell us, “we told you so,” when they warned leaders to prepare well if we want to sacrifice life and health for money and convenience.  Maybe too, we should ask ourselves whose health are we sacrificing really, and to whom will the money go?  We are back to square one indeed, but the question is, HAVE WE LEARNED, AND ARE WE READY, PLAYER ONE?