Fear of ‘enhanced poverty’

By Herbert Vego

THIS corner begs of Iloilo City Mayor Jerry Treñas and Iloilo Governor Arthur Defensor Jr. to keep on  resisting the recommendation of the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-MEID) to place their jurisdictions under Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) that would completely lock down non-essential businesses and restrict travel effective today.

Until yesterday, both local government units were enforcing a relaxed Modified Enhanced Community Quarantine (MECQ) status, allowing limited religious and social gatherings but banning the operation of bars, clubs, internet cafes, theme parks, billiard halls, gyms, spas, swimming pools, museums, and outdoor tourist attractions.

Given the authority, Treñas would have downgraded MECQ into General Community Quarantine (GCQ), which allows regulated movement of persons while observing basic health protocols on wearing shield and mask, hand sanitation and physical distancing. Mass gatherings reduced to a maximum of 30 percent capacity of venue are allowed.

Until yesterday, both politicians had steadfastly cooperated with IATF in enforcing quarantine restrictions, albeit with leniency if the situation so demands. So why the change of heart?

To put it bluntly, the CQs have done more harm to the people than the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) that was meant to be demolished. You see, in the past one year and four months of on-and-off lockdowns, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority, at least 4.2 million Filipinos nationwide have lost their jobs. The underemployed – the working population with not enough income for basic needs — number 7.34 million individuals.

Those figures certainly overwhelm the number of Covid-19 cases, now at 1.48 million nationwide, of which only 26,232 have died.

Of those numbers, the share of Western Visayas totals 68,672 cases and 1,400 deaths. As of yesterday, Iloilo province had 2,938 active cases while Iloilo City had 1,650.

“We cannot afford to close all businesses if we go under ECQ,” the mayor said. “People will be out of work and everyone will be in a most difficult situation.”

Both Treñas and Defensor believe that the spread of the pandemic would eventually taper with the completion of the vaccination program.

Methinks, however, that since not everybody agrees to be vaccinated, the Department of Health (DOH) should pay more attention to the already Covid-sick.  I speak from my personal experience – 12 days of hospital confinement.

During a phone conversation with Congresswoman Janette Garin (1^st District, Iloilo), I revealed that I had spent a fortune for medicine because it could not be charged to Philhealth. I even had to sign a waiver absolving the hospital of accountability should I end up worse. What if I had no money? I could not have survived!

Garin, a former DOH secretary, agreed with my observation.

The public perception until now is that there is no medicine for Covid, and simply because none of the available medicines – such as remdesivir, favipiravir and ivermectin — have earned the approval of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Instead of scaring and stressing us with “deadlier new variants” of coronavirus, couldn’t the government have done better by comforting us with true tales on how the majority of Covid patients recover?

Uncontrolled anxiety — a feeling of fear about what’s to come – as confirmed by the American Psychological Association, weakens the responses of our immune system because. “it decreases the body’s lymphocytes, the white blood cells that help fight off infection.”

Just by confirming the curability of Covid and rendering service in that direction, DOH could have appeased instead of pissed us.

Remember, tuberculosis used to be as scary in the absence of prescribed medicine. It ceased to be so with the formulation of a healing regimen – in either tablet or syrup — that takes six months of continuous intake.

We are told that while the majority or at least 60 percent of Covid cases are asymptomatic – or with no such usual symptoms as fever, cough, hard breathing, diarrhea, lack of appetite and muscular pain – they could still infect others nearby. It is hard to believe this claim in the absence of published case studies comparing the symptomatic and asymptomatic.

I know of nine persons who were home-quarantined for 10 days after their RT-PCR tests showed “positive-asymptomatic”. In that period when a doctor occasionally visited, none of them ever complained of feeling sick.

But they did complain of fear and acute income deficiency.