Loose restrictions relax self-control

LETTERS FROM THE AGNO
March L. Fianza

BAGUIO CITY -- Before we welcome each other to a GCQ (general community quarantine) status on February 1 until February 15, 2021 in the Cordillera; I got information that the annual media launching of the Chinese Spring Festival for the Year of the Metal Ox of 2021 has been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
    However, businessman Roland Wong who owns the Chongloy News Agency (ChoNA) based in Luisa’s Café, Session Road said, the Filipino-Chinese community in the City of Dwindling Pines decided to launch the Chinese Lunar New Year in a simple program at the City Hall on Monday, February 1st, by donating 200 bags of rice for barangays.
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National Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) contact tracing chief and Baguio City Mayor Benjamin Magalong confirmed that the Cordillera Region will return to GCQ general community quarantine (GCQ) to contain the spread of the coronavirus. This was the city’s quarantine status on May 15, 2020 until May 31, 2020.
    Restrictions include stricter border control between LGUs in Benguet, Mountain Province and other provinces, with travelers seeking to enter borders having to present medical clearances to authorities.
    This means that during the same period, restaurants would have to limit their capacity to 30%, persons aged 15 years old and below must stay at home, and so with our elders aged 65 years old and above.
    It has yet to be backed by scientific evidence but the exponential rise in the number of COVID-19 cases in the region could be due to the relaxation of public health standards such as the wearing of masks and social distancing over the Christmas holidays.
    Apparently, people relaxed or let their guards down when restrictions loosened during the holidays. Although that may be considered as a factor in the alarming surge of infections of COVID-19 in the region, preventing transmission boils down to personal discipline.
    Around two weeks ago, health authorities found out that 13 of the 326 specimen samples of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) submitted by the DOH-CAR to the Philippine Genome Center turned out to be the UK variant.
    DOH Secretary Francisco Duque III said 12 UK variant samples were found in Mountain Province and one in La Trinidad, Benguet. But medical specialists in the DOH-Cordillera epidemiology and surveillance unit said they have yet to find out how the UK variant reached the region.
    It was good that the UK variant of the coronavirus which was said to be more infectious was earlier detected, of all places, at Barangay Samoki in Mountain Province. Since this calls for the isolation of those who were contact-traced, medical response should see to it that people are really quarantining themselves.
    Naturally, the discovery of the UK variant in the region is cause for alarm, not only for the medical experts but for everyone, because it has been reported that this has a higher probability of transmission.
    Basic arithmetic tells us that a more infectious virus increases the number of active cases and decreases bed capacity of hospitals. Without showing the numbers, this condition places the Cordillera Region at “high risk” category.  
    With 10,491 confirmed cases, the DOH marked the region as a “high-risk” area due to the increasing virus infection and a growth rate at 199 percent growth rate of the virus in the last two weeks, which indicated an alarming surge of infections.
    Yet, pandemic frontliners who have risked their lives since day-one wonder because while they exhaust extra time and effort to tell people to stay home and avoid non-essential travel, there are events in the city that promote tourism that are even endorsed. They party as if there is no COVID-19 pandemic.
    By the way, the public should know that putting the COVID-19 vaccine into peoples’ arms is not a free pass. The World Health Organization has just announced last week that with the vaccine, one can still transmit the virus and so, wearing the mask is still very necessary.
    Mayor Magalong said, sustain all health protocols. “It's the best we can do to safeguard ourselves and our families,” he said.