MEDIUM RARE

So many things about the coronavirus that we don’t know about, yet. Is it airborne, and if it is, will it make it an even tougher enemy to wipe out? Why is it spreading so fast in the National Capital Region, after five months of strict isolation, quarantine, and limited movement of people and goods? Between what we are being told by DOH, that we are already experiencing community transmissions, and what the experts in analytics are projecting, which is 85,000 cases by July 31, have we now reached the stage of an exponential growth in transmissions?

Exponential is a troublesome word. Exponential doesn’t mean one spreader multiplying the spread by, say, 2 or 3 persons and stopping there. It means, for example, 3 people each infecting 3 others, or a total of 9, and each of those 9 infecting 9 others, or 81 in total, courtesy  of just one “original” carrier.

In Florida, one big hot spot in the US, public health authorities wonder if contact tracing is still useful in light of the thousands upon thousands of cases being reported daily. Meanwhile, the race is on among pharmaceutical companies in the US and Europe to produce THE vaccine that hopes to protect the world from infection. That’s the good news. The bad news is that those vaccines being developed in the US, UK, Germany, Switzerland and Japan will need several more months to start clinical trials on humans before they can be pronounced effective. What’s more, they are likely going to cost a very pretty penny. Hydroxychloroquine, which excited President Trump as a possible cure not so long ago, costs $43 or P2,150 per vial.

Sometime in the early ‘60s, as a businessman whose family was once engaged in the pharmaceutical business recalls, when influenza or flu was an epidemic in the Philippines, a cheap medicine came to the rescue of sneezing, feverish Filipinos who also complained of headaches, muscle pain and such. It was not a vaccine, it was a little pill manufactured by a local drug company. Decades later, and thanks to that simple tablet, flu is now just another seasonal inconvenience, with the drug maker going on to make billions. Let’s hope a COVID-19 cure will come from a PH pharma.