WE LIVE in even more uncertain times. You do not know who among your friends are going to die next from Covid-19 or if it is your turn to kick the bucket.
The other day, my eight-year-old granddaughter worriedly asked if I had “the corona” after I told her not to go near me because I had the cold. When I said the same thing to her younger sister, a look of concern flashed on her face before she ran out shouting “Papa Boy is going to die!”
There is so much misinformation going around these days such as that Covid-19 can be cured by eating bananas or that the Wuhan doctor who first reported the presence of the disease and ironically died from it had recommended tea as treatment. The banana thing was at least good for our farmers because it drove the gullible to the fruit stands. As for the tea, I hope that we had, amid our panic, the good sense to pause and ask ourselves why the doctor (poor fellow, he already suffered enough while he was alive) died even after he discovered the cure for the Covid-19.
These are relatively harmless gossip. Other than the unfair commercial advantage they give to bananas over other fruits and tea over other drinks, they do not cause any real loss or damage. Let the people deal with the untruth on their own; the government has bigger information concerns to deal with and more gaping holes to cover, the most gaping being in the state of the public health vis-a-vis the Covid-19 outbreak.
How many cases do we really have? How many have been tested and where? What were the results? From which places do the confirmed cases come from? These are information that we have to be updated on daily. The health undersecretary does that in Manila. Why can the DOH not do it in Cebu?
They do not even have to call a press conference. They have a website. They have a Facebook page. All that they need to do is post the updates on these sites daily and without fail.
We got angry when a lawyer posted a list of supposed Covid-19 patients. But that is not the same as saying that we did not believe him because most of us did or were at least ready to believe him. The accuracy of the list has not been denied, by the way, but that is not the point. He could have placed 100 names, most of them fictitious, but we would still have somehow believed it anyway in the absence of information coming from official sources. When there is a vacuum of information, gossip and speculation take over.
Incidentally, why do we hide the identities of Covid-19 patients and deaths? There is a law that protects privacy, that is true, but it does not prohibit the person concerned or, in appropriate cases, the family from revealing the information.
The coronavirus is dreadful but there is no shame from being infected with it. It’s not like AIDS or venereal disease which we usually associate with sexual promiscuity. Most of the time, we do not even know who gave us the infection. So there no such thing as stigmatization.
People will of course avoid us, including our families. But isn’t that what the government wants? Isn’t it ironic that while we are advised to practice social distancing, we are not allowed to know the people from whom we should particularly keep ourselves two meters away?
Anyway, back to the regular updates, I hope to see one today and every day thereafter.