THE Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center’s (VSMMC) sub-national laboratory SNL) is now in full swing in its independent release of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test results, and the better part of the story is that for two days, no specimen turned out positive of the coronavirus 2019. On April 1, 2020, though, one case in Consolacion town tested positive. That brings to 21 the total number of Covid-19 cases in Central Visayas.
Every day, we take moments holding our breath to check on the figures, hoping for if not a calm, at least only small swells, some starkly different scenario from the exponential waves somewhere else in the world. Or in the country, now at 2,084 in the March 31 count, with only 3,938 tests done.
In this war against the pandemic, it’s you, reader, who are at the frontline. You are the first line of defense. It’s not your doctors and nurses. More than armed with stock know-how on how to beat the virus, they are at the receiving end—equipped with science in clean rooms with all the life-saving machines in place.
You, however, are out there—in all the red zones of the city where this furtive devil looms. Internalize your role. Understand that the trick against the enemy is pretty simple—extra hygiene, physical distancing, and a large bit of understanding that suspending our usual entitlements is a matter of life and death.
Government is doing its part, and even as it has the general welfare in view to inform its policies, it is also besieged by public pressure with a whole latitude of interests. By the hour, it is forced to accommodate just about any request from different sectors, and we all end up with a whole catalogue of exceptions—defeating the very game plan of bringing people movement down to a trickle, to break all the possible chains of viral transmission.
So before anything else, we need to have the consensus that Covid-19 is not a visiting fair with a scare clown in town. It’s claimer-Death itself on a shooting spree with a sweeping die-off in mind. As the cliché goes, there’s a “clear and present danger.”
When we all have internalized that fact—and lo and behold, a freezing fact it is at 36,571 deaths and 754,948 confirmed cases worldwide—we must now understand that even as we’re handed down policies crafted in imperfect ways, we’d rather that we err on the side of caution. No single soul had been here before and we’re all a bunch of clueless initiates—even government itself, which isn’t really known to employ the best minds in a community.