Trump’s ‘bravery’ and more on MORE

By Herbert Vego

 

US President Donald Trump, having quickly recovered from coronavirus disease (COVID-19), considers his one-week ordeal a “blessing in disguise” because it had proven the efficiency of an experimental antibody cocktail that he had been treated with.

Indeed, the unmasked re-electionist President looked hale and hearty when he showed up for his first post-hospitalization campaign rally in Orlando, Florida (his home state) on Monday.

He wished it would be possible for the rest of the COVID-afflicted Americans to be similarly cured.

He assured his mostly unmasked and dense audience, “We’ve all endured a lot together, and we are doing better by far than in 2016. We are going to have an even greater victory [on November 3] than we did four years ago.”

Trump has steadfastly blamed China for spreading the “China virus” to destabilize the world economy, with the United States as primary target.

But it’s he that critics unanimously accuse of laxity in implementing lockdowns in most US cities. The US remains to be the number one economic and military power even if it has had more than eight million COVID cases in the past seven months, of which 220,000-plus have died.

However, Trump seems to be regaining the upper hand now that the World Health Organization (WHO) seems bent on abandoning the lockdown solution that it has asked all nations to implement. No less than WHO’s special envoy for COVID-19, Dr. David Nabarro, said in an interview on British television that he had never advocated lockdown as the primary means of control of coronavirus because it could ravage the economy and impoverish the less fortunate.

“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified,” he said, “is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted. But by and large, we’d rather not do it.”

OMG, why is he saying that only now? Has the WHO finally determined that the tested asymptomatic-positives do not really infect others?

On the premise that the dreaded disease is curable, I have always said in this corner that safety protocols – basically social distancing, face-masking and hand-washing — could have been implemented without closing down offices, stores, restaurants and public transportation.

Oh well, our political leaders have only succeeded in recommending false solutions, like “gasoline and diesel” as mask disinfectants, fueling further panic to the pandemic.

-oOo-

 

ILOILO CITY’S POWER NEEDS TO DOUBLE IN FIVE YEARS

 

BARRING unforeseen circumstances, Iloilo City’s power supply would double from 130 mega-volt amperes (MVA) to 260 MVA.

That is the estimate of MORE Power President Roel Z. Castro, assuming that the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic would not devastate our city’s economy.

Based on that optimistic projection, Castro told the radio program “Tribuna sang Banwa” on Aksyon Radyo (Sunday, 12:15 to 1:15) that the city’s distribution utility would have to acquire at least three new substations in addition to the existing five old substations and one new 10-MVA mobile substation.

There is no problem  because such an expansion falls within MORE Power’s projected initial capital expenditure of P1.9 billion.

But first, in order to survive, the company has to rehabilitate all defective facilities and weed out the illegal connections “inherited” from previous franchisee Panay Electric Co. (PECO). MORE had discovered at least 30,000 of them that steal power with the use of so-called “jumpers”.

Holy cow! That number represents a third of the total users, counting the 65,000 paying customers as shown by MORE’s database. This means that the company has been losing millions of pesos in its first seven months of operation.

In fact, the company has already dismantled some 10,000 of the power pilferers. Fortunately, most of them have availed themselves of MORE’s offer to apply as low-load customers.

Should they attempt to re-install jumpers, they could be detected with the use of high-tech thermal scanners that monitor abnormal power fluctuations in the distribution lines, connectors, transformers and other facilities.

To neutralize the caught “installers” of illegal connections and their protectors, MORE has already filed cases against around 30 of them in court.

“Jumpers” could harm the pilferers themselves because they could trigger power outages and cause pole fires.

Kon tuod gid man ang reports that some of these syndicate leaders and members are barangay leaders and tanods, untati na abi jump-jump. The house you save from fire could be your own.