LAST week, about the Baguio lockdown. This week, about testing.

This week, four of the Baguio “positives” agreed to have their names known so that those who may have been in contact with them could take necessary precautions. This week too, and as of this writing, Baguio’s Covid curve flattened for a fifth consecutive day.

While that is stupendous news, we cannot resort to complacency. Rather, we should perhaps be even more vigilant about the reliability of that so-called flattening. This column says again, the more testing occurs, the more cases will be detected. Again, in short, are we testing enough, detecting enough, to be reliable about the flattened curve?

Voices abound for mass testing to occur in our town. There is wisdom in that, methinks. At the same time, however, can our health care system take the number of surfaced positive cases should such mass testing occur? There’s the rub. We think of this as a country, and there’s more rub.

There’s even the opinion that the reason China has no new cases is that they stopped testing. If there were truth to that, how safe could their reopening be?

After China, it was South Korea that aggressively implemented mass testing; they even set up tents for the purpose, and cars could just drive through and their passengers tested in a jiffy. When they first did that, their numbers spiked, but there was more accuracy to their so-called curve than before the mass testing. Are we simply scared of such a spike if we mass test in the Philippines?

We look at the rest of the world, and see that the more testing is done, the higher the numbers are. In virtually every country, Covid-19 has reared its frightening head, testing or no. The pandemic has been called the worst global crisis since World War II. This column submits that this is a world war; I even told my best friend that this is World War III. We fight against an unseen enemy, but we do so on a global scale nonetheless.

To be thankful for: Women—mothers and wives and sisters and daughters—are not sending out sons and husbands and brothers with guns and grenades to fight at a bloody battlefront with tanks and weapons of mass destruction. It’s the opposite: we battle by staying home, keeping the family and household healthy, disinfected, and still, somehow.

To be thankful for: A wired world, though I’m told radiation, radiation, radiation. That said and as an item that must be dealt with, the Internet is keeping us all connected, informed, alive, safe, sane. I think that the challenges we face housebound also stretch our creativity in ways that can be good. Just look at how the Net has new posts for the one million and one ways to bake bread without yeast.

To pray for besides our family and friends: our frontliners—doctors, nurses, orderlies, cleaners, policemen, those who make their protective gear and ours, those who work in the markets, those who plant and raise what we eat, those who deliver all that to us, the health experts who go online to share of their knowledge. You add the rest. There are so many, many more.

To pray for: Our World, at war, that we may win against this deadly virus that knows no boundaries.