MEDIUM RARE
Jullie Y. Daza
Of the virus mutating so quickly and infections rising so exponentially that as my friend observed, “the numbers now come with familiar faces.”
Your son’s teachers are getting hit. His classmates, too. You’ve lost a colleague or a batchmate. A group of girls wondered why their barkada did not answer txts and phone calls for weeks. It never dawned on them that their calls went unanswered because she had passed on. Where before, you heard of well-known strangers falling prey to the disease, now the circle seems to be tightening as the numbers come with names that ring a bell – a cousin, an in-law, someone whom you met face to face once and tagged as an acquaintance, someone with whom you had formed a bond or alliance in your professional or social life. They could be a member of your club, a distant friend, even a special one or, heaven forbid, someone within your clan. (To be fair, if COVID-19 deserves any fairness, the pandemic is not the only destroyer.)
Be afraid that COVID is being spread, possibly not by droplets alone but also by airborne particles. As infectious-disease experts warn – read The Lancet, the UK’s most prestigious medical journal – it’s unwise to ignore studies that show, backed up with meticulous scientific data, how aerosols are transmitting the virus. Droplets drop but aerosols hang in the air and stay there for as long as 3-1/2 hours; beware of airconditioning ducts in hospitals and crowded spaces. It is “dangerous,” the experts say, to insist that the studies are “inconclusive.” Hmm, sounds familiar?
Be afraid of fanatics who will not admit that power in the wrong hands – theirs? – is so easily misused and abused by the smallminded. Why is the Grab driver who delivered lugaw and was told it was “not essential because you can live without it” so afraid of losing his job and his safety after filing a complaint against the barangay “official” who accosted him? Why is the owner of the restaurant that produced the lugaw in tears, afraid that the unabated harassment will lead to closure of her business? COVID survivor DILG Secretary Año should step in, unless he wants the acronym to stand for Deliver Instant Lugaw Gladly.