"ARE we ready?" was the question we asked on Jan. 28, 2020. The teeny culprit called the "novel coronavirus" or "2019 nCov," which took the shape of the ancient morningstar, had already claimed 106 human lives and infected over 4,500 people in Wuhan, China. The National Health Commission of China saw that in the second half of January, the count was portentously leaping from 45 to 4,515. Do the math, and that was roughly 300 transmissions a day and seven people dead daily. Contagion was that dark cloud looming over our heads. That was why we asked, "Are we ready?"
We asked for an inventory of our local public health care facility, seeing that the surge of cases greatly overwhelmed the epicenter. Again, this was January yet. Instead, we get the flak that we were being "alarmist" or "racist" for calling a ban on China flights.
The fear, in fact, wasn't entirely abstract. On Jan. 12, 2020, we ran a blood test on a feverish boy from a Wuhan flight; the sample specimen showed traces of the virus, but we had to send a sample specimen to a laboratory in Australia for confirmation.
As January closed, we had our first confirmed cases in the country, a couple who flew in from Wuhan to Cebu via Hong Kong aboard a Cebu Pacific flight. They took the same airline to Dumaguete hours after arrival in Cebu and another airline going to Manila following developing symptoms. The husband died on Feb. 2, 2020. Our officials initially tasked the Bureau of Quarantine to do the contact tracing, and it was only weeks later, during a Senate hearing that Sen. Bato dela Rosa suggested to Health Secretary Francisco Duque III to make use of the police organization to help in the contact tracing. Government assured we had enough lead time to prepare, and they meant the whole month of February, but just like that, time easily ate up the whole month and hardly was our health care system ready for the pandemic.
Time dragged and it was only in mid-March when a total lockdown was ordered. At that time, there was already palpable curve, although we weren't devoid of a better chance to arrest an ensuing spike. But April came, and the "binignit" pool of people scampering in Carbon market became sure ball super-spreader. April, indeed, was our tipping point, and the rest was history.
It was also in March when we asked for "surgical precision" in dealing with urban poor areas as the health crisis loomed. On April 7, 2020, cases in Sitio Zapatera in Barangay Luz broke out. Bursts also came in Barangays Mambaling, Pasil, Labangon, among others, urban poor communities mostly. You can recall the clumsy ways they were dealt with, the lack of real-time reporting, date coordination among agencies and whatever government did was apparently vulnerable to noise.
We, of course, knew it took a national body to take over and put some order. It was August then when we eventually saw some sober system in place.
There is much to be said of the year that we're about to leave behind. One crazy timeline that laid bare a lot of things. Whatever, we lunged into this rite of passage if only for a semblance of supposedly starting new things, reflecting on the old.
We can cluck our tongue for missed chances and all. We can do better.