MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Nineteen days after the Quiapo phenomenon of more than 200,000 devotees turning out en masse to honor the Black Nazarene, we have yet to hear if superspreaders added to the transmission of COVID-19 cases in the NCR. Or if it’s simply a case of no news is good news. The data streaming in show a definite uptick after the December holidays, but so far no one has connected any rise in numbers to the Jan. 9 fiesta in Quiapo. Valenzuela City Mayor Rex Gatchalian attributed the five-fold increase (from 50 to 260) in his city to the merrymaking last Christmas.  Manila, which until lately was more or less a regular in the Metro’s list of cities with a high rate of transmissions, has been behaving, in a manner of speaking, by staying out of the top five. Quiapo being the home and heart of the Nazarene devotions, it is almost a miracle that no one’s blaming the massive congregation, despite the toned-down rites, for any uptrend in the figures. I thought I was the only one entertaining such an out-of-this-world outlook, until I asked Edson Guido, who heads ABS-CBN data analytics, for his opinion. Edson said, “Oo nga, grabe. Surprising.” Four short words, but for a mathematician and statistician to use those words in a text message, it was saying a lot. “Surprising” is accurate; days before the highly anticipated, traffic-causing event, prognosticators were wringing their hands, wrinkling their brows and worrying about the consequences of such a humongous turnout in the time of the pandemic. As it happened, parish officials were proud of the devotees’ obedience to the rules set down by the organizers. For the most part, crowd control was successful, unprecedented. The Pope’s ambassador, the Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Charles John Brown, confessed he was “blown away” by the spectacle of the Filipino’s “deep faith and spirituality” -- wait till Holy Week comes around, Your Excellency, and you’ll witness another form of religious fervor and commitment. In the meantime, what worries Edson as he looks at his charts and graphs is “the variant possibly spreading up North” and community transmission becoming a cause for concern. Why, even the President is asking everyone to “be religious in obeying injunctions” to stay safe and virus-free.