Editorial: Waking up from the Covid nightmare

PERHAPS Cebu needs to go through this current situation of rising coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) cases and a mounting death toll for people to take the pandemic seriously.

Yes, for the umpteenth time, the health crisis is real. It may not be as devastating as some sectors would like it to be, but it nonetheless poses a threat to the island’s health care infrastructure, which already suffers from the lack of manpower.

Yet, despite the pleas of government officials, many people continue to ignore minimum health protocols to prevent the spread of the disease.

For some, it has become a game of cat and mouse with authorities, not realizing that they’re playing with their own lives and the lives of their loved ones.

It only hits close to home when someone they know succumbs to Covid-19. They’re the types who then get on social media and lambast the government for not doing enough to prevent deaths. The very same persons who criticize the government for going overboard when the latter curtails their freedom of movement.

Cebu’s leaders find themselves in a precarious position. They have been striking a balance between ensuring the health and safety of everyone and trying to jumpstart a flagging economy. But they can’t keep on doing this without public help.

If it’s any consolation, the breakdown of Covid-19 cases has not changed since day one. The number of mild and asymptomatic patients continues to hover around 96 percent even though the number of Covid deaths in the first 12 days of August has eclipsed the number of deaths in the last three months combined. That is because Cebu Island set another record on Thursday, Aug. 12, 2021, when it breached the 12,000 active cases mark for the first time with 12,009 active cases.

It goes without saying that as the number of cases goes up, so does the number of fatalities even though these make up a small percentage of the whole.

Which is why these figures should give everyone, especially chronic quarantine violators, pause.

It should already sink in that a highly transmissible variant of the novel coronavirus is in our midst and may be responsible for the recent surge in Covid cases.

So there is no reason proven health and social measures to prevent infections and reduce the spread of the virus should be ignored.

In other words, the alarm has gone off. It’s time to wake up. Otherwise, Cebu and the rest of the country will never get out of this Covid nightmare.