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TO be perfectly honest, with the nightmarish course of the Covid-19 pandemic since February, I would have probably stopped writing by March as I would have been so busy using most of my meager savings stocking up on rice, coffee and canned goods; preparing for a refuge somewhere in the mountains or in a remote Boracay-kind of island; and arming myself with pistols and rifles (to fend off looters).

But I didn’t because of one thing: China.

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RENE Velasco, my best friend in the past two decades and comrade in both the activist Maoist days of our youth and in government in our adult life, passed away last Saturday from pneumonia caused by Covid-19.

It’s a surreal, terrible feeling that something in the news everyday in the past two months, about which I’ve written so many articles, would snuff out the life of a dear friend, whom I couldn’t even visit when I first heard that he was in hospital. It would be like reading and writing about a serial killer, who would then kill a close friend.

Rene and I were communist cadres in our college days, he the secretary of the party group in the University of the Philippines when I was head of the party organization in Metro Manila. Unlike many of our comrades at that stage in our lives though, our egos were not invested in the communist cause, nor in the camaraderie of the struggle, nor relying on it for our livelihoods.

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TIME was when the Philippine elite’s mantra, what they saw as nearly the cure-all for everything that ailed the country, was “globalization.”

It was former president Fidel Ramos who practically made it a national policy. He ingrained the doctrine so much into the ruling class’ consciousness that the capture of even our key telecommunications industries by “global” companies like Hong Kong’s First Pacific Co. Ltd. and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings Pvt. Ltd. — even through a patent violation of our Constitution — has been nonchalantly accepted, even to this day.

In the globalist ideology, nations are remnants of the 20th century. In the 21st century, there would be a borderless world in which global companies source their materials and labor power from whatever part of the globe that is most efficient. Top corporate executives and millennials boasted that they were “global citizens” rather than parochial Pinoys. Children of the elite were sent to Ivy League schools in the United States and boarding schools in the United Kingdom to be our contributions to the world’s global citizens.

Guess what, most of the world have now shut down their borders to keep out the horrible coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic.

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THREE weeks into the lockdown of Metro Manila and other major urban areas in the Philippines, the government must now craft appropriate strategies to end this draconian but necessary means of containing the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic.

As I will try to explain here, such post-lockdown strategies are part and parcel of our war to defeat this plague, and its implementation has to start soon. The government must consult with local governments, the medical community, the private sector and others to develop such strategies.

While there could still be sudden spikes of infection and even deaths, and the colossal United States and European failure in dealing with the pandemic could affect us, it is reasonable to conclude that the lockdown has worked in containing Covid-19’s exponential growth.

It is rampaging in the US because Americans, and their political leadership, refuse to impose such lockdown. “That will create civil war,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo even said when President Donald Trump floated the idea of that state’s lockdown.

But the lockdown strategy has its huge costs: it means a cessation of production and other economic activities. The longer we have a lockdown, the more people won’t have livelihoods, more of the poorest will starve, worse will be the damage to the economic system.

Parachute
Even government’s P200-billion financial parachute for the poor will quickly run out. Simply having the central bank print more money — as tax revenues have and will fall because of the lockdown — to fund similar lifelines risks hyperinflation that would make the peso worthless.

We have to gradually end the lockdown, which means circumspectly allowing economic activity — i.e., factories, offices and distributors — to resume in an orderly manner. If we simply return everything to normal, that is, lift the enhanced community quarantine tomorrow, we risk some straggler virus force from spreading again exponentially, throwing back to the end-February status and maybe even more.

I list below a few elements of such a post-lockdown strategy.

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TO be frank, for a second or so, the news reported yesterday afternoon that we had 272 new Covid-19 cases, bringing the total to 1,075, sent a shiver down my spine.

That’s the highest increase in a day so far, although, as a health department official explained, the rise in the past several days may have been due to the increase in tests being undertaken and results coming in only recently. But no epidemiologist can really be certain whether we’ve reached the peak or are just starting on the curve. The statement of a United States health official has become classic: “It is the virus that makes the timeline.”

What gives some comfort though is how we stand compared to other countries.

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IF there’s anything the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic has demonstrated, incontrovertibly, I think, it is that at the end of the day, people and even our entire human species have to rely on strong — yes, even authoritarian states — for their survival.

Argue as much as you can over some details — for example, that Italy has a huge over-70 population, which made its citizens more vulnerable to the disease — the data stares us in the face:

It is nations with strong, authoritarian states — mainly the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation — that have beaten back this pandemic, which some religious fanatics even see as ushering the biblical end of days. Nearly overwhelmed in February with 77,016 cases, China now has just 3,947. Russia has only 626 case.

I would even include in that list Asian nations that have had a long history of authoritarianism — Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and, yes, even Japan — which appear to have the pandemic under control within their territories, with cases only by the hundreds, in contrast to the democracies with their tens of thousands.

We may not have an authoritarian state, contrary to what the Reds and Yellows are claiming, but we do have a strong leader.

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NEXT to the state (including its essential police and military apparatus) and excluding the anarchic, each-to-his-own corporate sector, the Roman Catholic Church has been the most powerful institution in the Philippines, even arguably in many Christian nations.

The world now faces one of its most serious crises since World War 2, with at least half a million souls likely to be infected by the coronavirus diseases 2019 (Covid-19) and 17,000 so far dying from its horrible symptoms. Millions of Filipinos will be going hungry because of the necessary house-per-house quarantine the government has imposed till mid-April.

Yet this second most powerful institution in the country, the Catholic Church is nowhere to be found. A recent photo, after the lockdown was imposed, of the Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene or Quiapo Church, the epicenter of the Black Nazarene procession attended by at least a million devotees that is the yearly demonstration of the Church’s colossal hold on Filipino consciousness, speaks a thousand words.

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SO far, we are not doing badly at all in our struggle to contain the deadly coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic that has plunged the world into a health crisis, which is likely to push the global economy into a recession never seen before.

Based on information midday Saturday, our country of 105 million has had 307 cases and 19 deaths. Just to put these figures in context, confirmed number of cases in South Korea is 8,897; Malaysia, 1,183; Japan, 1,054; Indonesia, 450; and Thailand, 411. A figure that could also put the Covid-19 situation in context is that in the 2012 dengue outbreak, there were 271,480 dengue cases, 1,107 of those infected dying of it.

We are certainly not over the hump, but I’m convinced that with the “enhanced community quarantine” — the stay-at-home order in the entirety of Luzon and the ban on travel to and from metropolitan Manila — we’re starting to contain this terrible pandemic.

What is needed now is intensified contact tracing to quarantine those who had even remotely been in contact with a confirmed case. We should have locked down the entire country starting March. An old friend and comrade, Aileen Baviera, was fatally infected with Covid-19 after attending a conference in Paris last March 5.

The biggest risk we face is a sudden and then sustained increase over the next two weeks of cases as happened in Italy, Spain and now in the United States. The deluge of cases in those countries engulfed their medical facilities. This, among other things, resulted in the steep fall of quarantine protocols in their hospital emergency rooms and intensive care units (ICUs), in turn creating more carriers, sadly even infecting the physicians and nurses themselves.

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THE best way to understand what’s happening, and to act appropriately, is that we are in the midst, or just approaching the zenith, of a deadly, invisible superstorm that is engulfing the globe.

It has roared through China, and has advanced into Europe. It is not clear whether Asia, especially Southeast Asia, including us, is the next target, or whether the superstorm has exhausted itself, with some thinking — or hoping — that it would dissipate like influenza toward summer.

We as families have absolutely no choice but to stay home and avoid any other social contact. If we haven’t yet been infected with the virus, then we don’t push our luck and go out to be infected. If we are infected, then it’s practically a crime if we still go out and spread the virus. If we don’t know whether we’re infected or not, then reason tells us not to put our fate and that of others to chance.

It’s really as simple as that. We wait for the storm to pass, for the virus to die a natural death.

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LET’s cut through the semantics. The government’s “enhanced community quarantine” (ECQ) is a lockdown for the entire Luzon island group, nearly the kind that was imposed on the former epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic — Wuhan, China — on January 23, and the next day on the entire Hubei province.

That Chinese response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic adheres to the dictionary meaning of “lockdown,” a state of isolation or restricted access. It has a pejorative connotation, though, since it is commonly used to refer to prisoners confined to their cells or a facility completely sealed off because of a security breach.

ECQ, which will last till April 12, though, is a kinder, more accurate term. “Quarantine” refers to a state of isolation in order to prevent a disease from spreading, which is precisely what the government’s ECQ is all about: stop the virus from spreading by limiting, as much as possible, social contacts, by which the virus leaps from one person to another.