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public health

public health, social / media

Navigating Through This Crisis: The Personal in Mass Testing #Covid19

April 11, 2020 by
N

My five siblings and I, including my two in-laws, keep a Viber group where we often exchange memes, artworks, and videos of our nieces, and in times like these, positions about things political and seemingly otherwise. I’m putting it lightly, considering that you can plot the eight of us neatly on a Cartesian plane and no two dots would be on the exact same point, no standpoint ever being in full agreement with another. There’s always a branching out, a curve, or a tone that each one of us bends the discussion to, as I presume it is in every family, rooted mostly in the different paths we have taken or are taking. Imagine, eight people stuck with each other with roughly 250 years of life between them.

Over the last weeks of March and the dawn of these lockdowns, the arguing was mostly between my older sister and I. She was (still is) at the frontlines in this COVID crisis and she hadn’t gone home to her husband and two daughters in more than two weeks, serving as one of the emergency room doctors in one of the leading private hospitals in Metro Manila. She was resolutely not in agreement with mass testing. On the left corner, I had been entertaining the thought of mass testing as the next, logical step we could take—led by government, of course—upon reading the World Health Organization’s (WHO) campaign for it and the supposed success it heralded in South Korea and other countries. The #MassTestingNow bloc was also the only pointed segment in civil society that was visible and moving.

I was taken by my political affinities when I campaigned, albeit briefly, on Twitter for #MassTestingNow. My sister, who is seldom online, saw it and immediately brought me to court in our Viber group, asking me what I thought it meant. I replied with what I thought mass testing entailed, optimistically citing the cases of South Korea and Wuhan, as talked about in an article by the New York Times, and the best-case scenario recommended by the WHO. I did not forget to include the statement prepared by a group called Scientists Unite Against COVID-19 which defines itself as a group of “concerned scientists, organizations and other citizens,” though there are no specific signatories in the statement.

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public health

The body count #Covid19

April 6, 2020 by
T

“There are truths, there are lies, and there are statistics”

My driver, JanJan, is desperate.

JanJan is married with a 9 month old child. He supports his wife and his recently widowed mother. They live in Laguna. He works in Makati and commutes every weekend to his home.

When the ECQ was imposed in mid-March I asked JanJan to return to Laguna until the end of the lockdown. I called him yesterday to find out how he was and how I can send him money. JanJan told me he is unable to leave his small Barangay to go to Sta. Cruz, the nearest community with a remittance center. He cannot buy food because all sari-saris, groceries and market have closed. He goes direct to farmers for whatever food they have to sell. There is nothing for his child.

JanJan’s plight is replicated by millions all over this country. Yet even as Government officials talk of the billions now available for the poor there is no mechanism to recognize and identify the so called “poor”. They are the faceless victims of a crisis that our decision makers and armchair pundits like myself pay token attention to; buried in the statistics, the political rhetoric and empty expressions of concern.

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public health

Food, armor, information in the fight VS #Covid19

April 3, 2020 by
F

by Orlando E de Leon

Where I left off, I averred two things: 1) that I don’t consider our health workers as frontliners, and 2) that we mis-allocated some tasks. On top of these, I identified the family and the home as the real frontliners.

As a Marine General, I have always considered our medical personnel as part of our REAR ELEMENTS. In the thick of battle, we bring our casualties to a collection point for first aid, and are further transferred back in line for better medical attention. I never dreamed that my medical personnel, my rear, will fight for me. The implication being, that I have been overrun. My lines have been overrun by the enemy. I have failed. Time to commit hara-kiri.

Having said that, why are we in this very situation right now? Why is our rear fighting in front? Have we been overrun? I don’t think so, not at this point in time. My assessment is that we near-panicked that we failed to determine which and where our front and rear are. We scrambled to get a grip of the situation while innovating on the best course of action to take. To me this is very normal. So normal, in fact, that 80% of commanders would have similar reactions. I would have been in the same frame of mind considering that the enemy we have been confronted with is both INVISIBLE and INVINCIBLE. But we need to recover from near-shock and reassess, then reconsolidate, our position. This is where we are now.

As promised, I will answer two questions: 1) what type of war are we fighting? 2) how are we going to fight it?

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public health

The real frontliners in this fight VS #Covid19

April 1, 2020 by
T

by Orlando E. de Leon

Please consider this as a product of a quarantined mind, hence an idle one. It does not intend to hurt sensibilities, but rather to provoke some thoughts, not a fight. Hehehe.

One of the principles of war is “simplicity.” A war plan, or an action plan for that matter, should be kept as simple as possible, so that a private can understand it. Keep in mind that only a handful of generals and officers make the plan. A multitude of soldiers, who has no idea what these generals and officers are thinking, will execute the plan. Picture that out.

I have an aversion to plans that are more of a display of English proficiency and political correctness than straightforward language.

War is chaos. A plan intends to manage this chaos. This is why most plans focus on the essential tasks each and every one will perform. Likewise, each and every individual should know and understand the importance of each task in the whole scheme.

Why am I saying all of these? Well, because I see a weakness in our defense plan. Why defense plan? Because we have not invented the weapon to fight the enemy, yet. Hence, we cannot go on the offensive.

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public health

Thinking about the virus #Covid19

March 22, 2020 by
T

by Orlando Roncesvalles

The virus has us all riveted to our seats, watching the news, helplessly wondering what will happen next. Will we be “shut in” forcibly, as in China? Will we be more like Italy and Spain with draconian measures to keep almost all at home, not so much by force but by community efforts? Can we have something less drastic like Korea, where there is no lockdown but massive testing allows for infected people to be isolated early in the course of the epidemic. The answers are not easily found.

A thought experiment may point to how we might go about finding a reasonable approach. Suppose there were only two persons in an economy, and we cannot tell who is infected. But for sure, one of them is sick. If both go out and work, all get infected. Both die. And we have no more economy. This is the scenario if we did nothing at all to confront the virus.

If we don’t test, we can lockdown all at home, as we do now for Luzon. That effectively shuts down the economy. But at least the economy revives when a vaccine or cure is found. This means that lockdown is better than doing nothing. Lockdown at least keeps half the population alive while we wait for a vaccine or cure. Doing nothing is something like suicide, irreversible, or worse, a form of homicide.

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