Do we have to wait for a vaccine?

By Herbert Vego

 

“AANHIN pa ang damo kung patay na ang kabayo?”

It’s a Tagalog adage literally asking, “What’s the grass for if the horse is dead?”

That reminds us of President Rodrigo Duterte asking patients to patiently wait for the availability of the first vaccine against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

We have read netizens react, “If it’s from China never mind.”

Oh, well, why patronize the source of the COVID-19 scourge? As of yesterday, records at the World Health Organization’s (WHO) showed an accumulation of 26,135,992 COVID cases worldwide in the past six months, of which 865,632 have died.

While the Philippines’ 226,440 cases is the highest number in Southeast Asia, only 3,623 or 1.6 percent of them have died.  Isn’t that low mortality rate an indicator that we don’t have to wait for a vaccine to get well?

That number still pales in comparison to deaths arising from other “popular” respiratory diseases like flu and pneumonia. In the last census year of 2017, according to the Philippine  Statistics Authority (PSA) more than 57,000 Filipinos died of pneumonia.  And yet anti-flu and anti-pneumonia vaccines has remained optional.

The United States’ Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Remdesivir as the first drug approved as emergency treatment for COVID-19 even if studies on its effectiveness are still ongoing.

We would probably also panic if media were to sensationalize daily deaths from heart diseases. Based on the same census, heart diseases in Philippines reached 120,800 or 19.83% of total deaths in 2017.

Who knows? Due to COVID-driven anxiety and depression, more Filipinos could have already died of heart diseases than of COVID itself.

To be depressed is to weaken one’s immune system. Like all other animals, the human being has an immune system that could produce antioxidants capable of neutralizing harmful bacteria and viruses.

That probably supports the WHO’s findings that 82% of COVID-infected patients have only mild manifestations; 15% severe manifestations;  and only 3% hit the critical stage.

If you know of people who have recovered while in the hospital, they certainly would tell you what antibiotics they have been treated with.

The WHO recommends basic protocols aimed at “straightening the curve” – including wearing mask, social distancing, disinfecting hands with alcohol or washing them with soap and water.

Toward the same end, the WHO has also prevailed upon governments to impose community quarantines on the presumption that  even asymptomatic people – those who move around because they show no symptoms of the disease — may spread the disease.

Not everybody in the WHO agrees. No less than Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the WHO’s emerging disease and zoonosis unit, admitted to the media that asymptomatic transmissions are “very rare.”

To see if Kerkhove is correct, I suggest that our Department of Health (DOH)  conduct RT-PCR COVID tests on the wandering Badjaos who brave sun and rain without coming down.  If some of them test asymptomatic COVID-positive without infecting the gang, then the WHO maverick is right.

-oOo-

WHAT has become of the threat of party-list Congressman Joseph Stephen Paduano to initiate a probe on the “inefficiency” of Iloilo City’s power distributor, More Electric and Power Corp. (More Power)?

Since he was obviously pushing for the re-entry of the previous player, Panay Electric Co. (PECO), his colleagues could not take him seriously. After all, it was the House committee on legislative franchises that had junked PECO’s application for renewal of its franchise, awarding it instead to MORE Power.

The only flimsy hope that PECO clings to is the pending resolution of the Supreme Court (SC) over MORE Power’s petition to reverse the ruling of the Mandaluyong City RTC declaring its congressional franchise unconstitutional.

“Flimsy,” I said, because it was the SC itself that had restrained the said RTC from enforcing its ruling.  Otherwise, the expropriation law (RA 11212) granting a 25-year franchise to MORE Power could not have been implemented.

Its own legislative franchise having expired, what is there for PECO to fight for?  Sans franchise, it could no longer get a provisional certificate of public convenience and necessity (CPCN) from the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC).

To recall, the ERC had already done PECO a favor by extending the latter’s CPCN for one year beyond the expiration of its franchise on January 18, 2019.

The deterioration due to non-maintenance of the distribution system accelerated during that one-year period when PECO, using all sorts of dilatory actions in the various courts, delayed the issuance and implementation of the writ of possession for the takeover of the distribution by MORE.

There is obvious exaggeration in the claim of a group now sympathetic to PECO that all of the “65,000 electricity consumers in Iloilo City have asked the Supreme Court to settle immediately the legal issues between two distribution utilities.”

What’s mysterious is that some of the group’s leaders – including terminated PECO employees — had previously joined the public outcry against the renewal of its expiring franchise. Why the change of heart? Lab ni nila ang PECO?

Well, if it’s their retaliatory way of skinning the fat cat, puede hangpon. Amigo ta man ina sila.