By Robert B. Roque, Jr.
The nation is in a great divide yet again as the government decides this week on whether or not to extend the two-week lockdown in Metro Manila and other areas.
As far opposite ends as they are on the wealth spectrum, business leaders and laborers voice out in unison much louder objections to life under enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) for a day longer than Friday.
To them, idle living is not living at all but a trap that places businesses in quicksand, spawns joblessness, and deprives the home of food, basic needs, and the fighting chance to rise above this pandemic.
Economic managers feel the same way about the bleeding national economy. Therefore, it is crucial for the government to remain afloat and liquid to support Filipinos in their hardest of times and, at the same time, respond to the demands of winning the war against a more virulent and more contagious COVID-19.
On the other hand, we have an overbeaten healthcare sector – inoculated against the virus but not immune to the punishing rigors of caring for the thousands upon thousands of COVID-19 patients piling up each day.
To medical frontliners, the rising numbers are screaming – overloaded utilization rates for intensive care units (ICUs), hospital beds and spaces, oxygen tanks, medicines, and duty hours – and begging for a stop to more infections.
Sadly, the only way to stop transmitting these wildly contagious COVID-19 variants is a hard lockdown. Or is it all we know?
Hope, though, springs in the bulk arrivals of more vaccine doses and the tireless efforts of local government units, along with the private sector, to inoculate as many people as supplies permit.
While many times in the past this corner has stood for the rights of the unvaccinated to choose the vaccine brand they want and even to refuse inoculation altogether, let it be clear that I am fully vaccinated and that I wish the same protection against COVID-19 for all Filipinos qualified to get it.
But Firing Line also denounces the greedy, who, for their own selfish sake, dare to take third doses as a booster shot even if doing so is illegal and, more importantly, deprives other citizens in dire situations the benefit of their first shot amid limited supply. How dare you!
As for the ECQ extension, or not, the government can only proceed with policies it sees best for the nation. Like it or not, we are duty-bound as Filipinos to cooperate in the hope of the best outcome.
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