ALMOST 10,000 detention prisoners, meaning those who are not serving their sentence, have been released as of March 29 as the Supreme Court sought to decongest jails that have become flashpoints of the coronavirus epidemic in the country. Many more will follow as the High Court has relaxed the rules in the grant and fixing of bail.
But even as we hope that the qualified prisoners can be released sooner than usual, local government units have to grapple with the problem of keeping their communities safe from the threat of contagion resulting from the arrival of the former detainees.
The fear is not without basis. The Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center and Cebu City’s Bagong Buhay Rehabilitation Center have become Covid-19 hotbeds. And what about those stepping to temporary liberty from local jails?
Former Naga City mayor Val Chiong said testing for the coronavirus is key to any plan to prevent the possible spread of the disease by prisoners returning to their homes. That should not be a problem for his city because they have a Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) testing machine stationed at the Vicente Sotto sub-national laboratory along with almost a thousand test kits.
All that incumbent Mayor Kristine Vanessa Chiong has to do is to invoke the memorandum of agreement it has with the Department of Health granting priority to Naga City residents in the use of their machine.
There is a petition, circulating on line, questioning the wisdom of the stay-at-home policy for senior citizens as well as the authority of the government to impose it.
The quarantine imposed on people who are sixty years old and above is unfair, unconstitutional, arbitrary and discriminatory in that it limits the exercise of their human and civil rights, the petition says. Only a lawyer could have committed such verbosity.
But make no mistake about it. The petition has become popular. It is trending on social media. Within a period of one week, I must have received the “Call to Action” more than ten times through Messenger, Viber and WhatsApp from friends, not surpringly, all seniors responding to the call to keep forwarding the message until it reaches the policy makers. “Please read, comment and share,” it says in bold caps.
Six weeks of eating, sleeping and staring at the four corners of the wall is really frustrating. I know. Been there, done that. And continue being there and doing that. There is a Cebuano term that best describes the feeling: makaburyong.
The quarantine on people our age was supposed to protect us, based on a World Heart Organization study that says that we are more vulnerable to dying from Covid-19 than those in the lower age groups. Let me illustrate that. If a 25-year-old and a 65-year-old contact the disease from the same source at the same time, the former has a greater chance of surviving than the latter. Otherwise stated, the older is likely to die compared to the younger.
But the petition claims that the assumption on vulnerability “is not based on conclusive study and research.” Between what he and the WHO says, I will take the latter’s opinion anytime. I will continue to stay at home until our health authorities declare that it is already safe to go out.
I do not begrudge those who are willing to take the chance. They have businesses to operate and professions to practice. The government should treat them equally with the rest of the population and unchain them. If, unfortunately, they succumb to Covid-19, at least it was a choice that they themselves made and we can probably say that in a sense, they died happily.