MEDIUM RARE
Jullie Y. Daza
Mask-Iwas-Hugas-Vax.
How my “drama queen” classmate describes her state of mind and body the night before she was told she would, as a senior citizen, get her jab of AstraZeneca vaccine: “My whole body trembled like it was Taal volcano! I lost sleep, I wanted to run away!” When she could not escape the inevitable and eventually submitted to her first dose, she needed a hot compress on her arm; her temperature had risen to 37.8. Twelve hours later, her son ordered a swab test on her “if only to stop me whining and for my peace of mind, if not his.” Satisfied that she had not caught the virus, “I was quarantined nevertheless in my room, until the test came out negative.”
Later, she was told that the hospital near her residence has been instructed by DOH to make arrangements to start accepting COVID patients at 20 percent bed capacity.
The story of how Joseph Estrada, “ex-movie star, mayor, senator, vice president, president, and convict,” had to wait in the emergency room overnight for a private room shows how our “health care system is choking.” For all his fame, wealth, power, and influence, patient Estrada had to sit it out like an ordinary citizen and await his turn for a surrendered room and bed.
If people continue to scoff at minimum health rules – as They keep telling us – this is a good time to scare them, hard. There’s nowhere to go. Caught by the virus, it’s either home-Q or a hospital with no bed for them, but as Marikina is showing us, “reverse isolation” is the solution to keep family-size transmissions down.
Should we learn from Japan’s need for a Ministry for Loneliness and appreciate more fully our noisy, touchy-feely, fun-loving families by bonding with them more tightly? Filipinos landed 61st in a list of 100 happiest countries. Japan, slightly happier at 56th, with its lonely bachelors who are afraid to court and single ladies who don’t find marriage more attractive than their careers, in a civilization where robots are now taking over a spectrum of chores, is telling us to value our families more. Keep safe one by one to keep everyone safe. This is not an option.