By Monsi A. Serrano
Last week, I expressed my opposition to the planned opening of cinemas and arcades, the reasons for which can be read by clicking this link:
We all are excited to go back to our normal life, where we can go out without PPEs, have time to go out with our family, attend meetings face-to-face and things we missed to do before the advent of COVID-19.
For someone who has a special child in the family, I feel sad that my daughter seems to be missing the old world she knew and loved where she can walk freely, go out to take her sanity break, and go to the church, to name a few of her activities.
But with the delay in the government’s vaccine rollout – an issue for which Malacañang’s mouthpiece says there’s no definite timeframe on the deliveries – perhaps, we might have to wait ad infinitum!
Funds, loans and grants for the vaccines have been made available, and yet there seems to be no movement. People are expecting a lot from the best and the brightest, not because we assumed you’re really the best and the brightest, but because you are dubbed as such.
In short, the expectations of the people are very high, because that is what they claim. But the million-dollar question is: “When will the mass vaccination begin?” Having this question in mind, and the sad state of the vaccination program of the country, you’d wonder why Bangladesh and Zimbabwe have already started their vaccinations while in the Philippines, there is no definite answer. If this kind of brouhaha happens in Japan, the first thing you will see in the headline is that the person in-charge has already resigned and issued a self-tormenting public apology.
Given this die wahr sitz im leben (the real situation in life) in the Philippines, we cannot afford to take the risk to ease up the community quarantine from the general community quarantine (GCQ) to moderate general community quarantine (MGCQ), because if you do that, it’s the greatest suicide to welcome COVID-19 in the country!
No, your honors. Even with the availability of the vaccines, we could not afford to take chances. If I said that the opening of the cinemas and arcades will cause an increase in COVID-19 cases, the country-wide MGCQ is not only idiotic but also a risk we cannot afford to do – given our scarce resources, apparent lack of system, and the limited health workers to attend to the patients in case the number of patients multiply a hundred times.
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