Frustration. That’s the final word.
“Pandemic fatigue” is not an unseen folly.
It’s the natural consequence of the miasma that is Rodrigo Duterte’s failure to defeat the COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s like a ticking bomb waiting to explode, a booby trap that we have stepped on when the country cruised into the lockdown’s first year. We were all waiting to see the pandemic vanish in a few months’ time, to revert back to our state of normalcy after the country gradually slid back to a General Community Quarantine.
While presidential mouthpiece Harry Roque’s ridiculous pronouncement that “we beat UP,” referring to esteemed University of the Philippines scientists and public health experts’ estimate that the country would log in some 40,000 cases by June’s end was a mockery of human intelligence, still, it offered an ounce of hope that we’re nearing the end of the tunnel — and the light is about to shine in our land.
Our misfortune, perhaps, is that.
That this heartless, ineffectual, corrupt leadership has been hyping us up with false hopes, with belated vaccines, with crumbs falling off their table of wealth. That hope, especially that hope for change, has become the banner of a ruthless government heaping death upon whomever it perceives to be deserving of the bullet. That death, instead of hope, traded places in the fight for a secure tomorrow.
Nothing else has marred the whole year of Duterte’s lockdown except that: death.
13,000 dead because of a contagion Duterte could’ve easily contained, suppressed, and defeated. 376 killed because of their political leanings or affiliation. Some 3,259 individuals who took their own lives because of a despairing and failed COVID-19 pandemic response. More than 30,000 murdered, even during the yearlong quarantine period, because of mere suspicion of criminal involvement. Hundreds of farmers and indigenous peoples massacred because they oppose destructive projects that pose a threat to their very existence. And millions more thrown in the throes of death because of hunger, joblessness, and economic dispossession borne out of Duterte’s mishandling of the pandemic.
And yet, Harry crows in public, this administration has had an excellent pandemic response.
While entire cities and provinces under a “bubble” have been enduring a week’s worth of stricter lockdown impositions — from a 6PM curfew to the barangay officials and policemen cursing at or snatching away “violators” — the country just logged in 15,310 cases in a single day, the highest tally of cases since March last year.
One by one, health workers, medical front-liners, and health institutions and hospitals themselves are starting to crumble under their feet. In Philippine Orthopedic Center, 110 out of 180 workers — some 61% of the Orthopedic’s manpower — tested positive for COVID-19. A senior citizen infected with the virus perished out in the cold, because hospital capacity to admit has been dwindling. A father carrying COVID-19 had to be brought in 11 — Jesus fucking Christ, 11 — hospitals before his family could even occupy a spot for him. And here’s a story of a family who, until the end, strived to save their father’s deteriorating life.
Left and right, social media has become our repository, our reservoir, of grief. Not a day passes when I don’t comment down the world condolences to friends who have their loved ones, friends, colleagues die because of illnesses that can’t be treated because practically the entire fragile healthcare system is geared to combat COVID-19 — or because of the pandemic itself.
Another Filipino’s life could’ve been saved if another bed, another room, another hospital have had another capacity to survive and to offer survival for those who are in dire need. But what do we see? It took an infection spate across 61% of the Philippine Orthopedic Center’s employees to renew calls for additional isolation facilities. Bed and hospital capacities are not replenished by a bedraggled and smug Health department.
Several COVID-19 patients even have to wait for a slot outside the hospital, where heat and cold, the infractions of weather, all combine within their plight. Some patients are even charged with P1,000 without any healthcare benefit — while they’re languishing in tents, the virus embedded within their bodies. Nearly half of the 15,310 victims of COVID-19 recorded yesterday are between 20 to 39 years old, the most robust and agile percentage of the country’s labor force.
No less than the DOH itself has said it has no plans of carrying out mass testing in the face of the rise in COVID-19 cases by the thousands. Our contact-tracing infrastructure remains an abomination. The measly aid offered for those who are affected by the Enhanced Community Quarantine within Manila’s bubble is a mere “afterthought” in a wide sphere of State policy.
4.5 million of our countrymen suffer from joblessness, while our foreign debt — purportedly owed by this regime to “aid” in the COVID-19 pandemic response — has swelled over to P10.4 trillion when March came to an end. And yet, we find ourselves mired in this quandary where COVID-19 is now overpowering our healthcare system. Did someone even mention the dismal vaccination rollout program?
And those politicians, the arrogant officials of the Duterte regime? They are all preoccupied with the politics of lugaw rather than dispensing the entirety of the country’s war chest against COVID-19 to avoid an impending healthcare system collapse.
Who would not be downtrodden with this show of degradation?
Who would not be suffused with anxiety as report after report of COVID-19 patients spend several days tracking down hospitals, make ends meet while saving enough to pay for hospital bills, suffer from the overwhelming surge that has afflicted the country’s frangible healthcare system, endure overcharging and other loopholes on their lonely quest to survive, and witness the arrogance, the undue excesses, of those who hold power whilst the citizenry is toiling under anguish?
Who would not be frustrated, if not enraged, with how the abuses are flaunted in front of our misery?
No wonder, the public would now suffer from a pandemic fatigue. A whole year of obsequious attitude toward minimum health protocols and impositions exerted by the Duterte government — even as state officials themselves flaunt some divine right of Duterte’s clique to violate laws and policies that, if an ordinary citizen transgresses, equates to arrest, abuse, or even murder — has rendered itself an utter failure in stemming COVID-19’s rise in the country.
Nothing can be more tangible at this time other than frustration.
Frustration. A seething, outrageous, enraging, inflaming, raging frustration. Frustration because the Duterte regime does not care if the virus kills us. Frustration that we cannot do anything, within our wherewithal, to save our health workers, our countrymen, from the enveloping reality of death or sickness — except to offer a deep, intimate, fervent prayer, to say a few words of hope in the midst of darkness.
Frustration. That’s our final word tonight.
