MEDIUM RARE

If 50 percent of Filipinos wore and threw away a face mask during the 365 days of 2021, you’d have had to dispose of 18,250,000,000 masks.

Even at 10 percent of those soiled masks, where would they have landed? Luckily or unluckily by chance, because ignorance is its own form of bliss, someone spotted a mountain of them, plus diapers and other medical waste, in the vicinity of Quezon Medical Center in Lucena City. And then everyone but everyone was shocked, for shame, for shame, and the governor and the hospital’s medical director tried to explain how the garbage got there and why it was still there (as of Thursday night), while assuring one and all, masked or not, that the problem would be solved “in eight days.” The bad news is that as surely as mask-wearing has become a habit, there are more hills and mounds of masks and other anti-COVID-19 paraphernalia out there, waiting to be trashed, drowning in some creek, or buried haphazardly in a shallow grave. Lucena is not alone in its shame. Maybe Metro Manila is better at hiding such garbage because this is an awfully congested metropolis. The only time I saw a real machine designed to look like a well-put-together disposal system was a brief TV report by a resourceful Davao-based correspondent.

Just to make you feel like choking – but first, remove your face mask! – the Lucena hospital’s wall of shame carried 100 tons of trash and germs. Philippines-wide, the national count is somewhere in the vicinity of 1,000 metric tons, all the medical/hospital waste, biodegradable and nonbiodegradable, you don’t want.

In Virac, Catanduanes, another TV reporter narrated how two children were seen playing with vaccine syringes that they had discovered in the trash dumped by a hospital. In Davao City, seven sacks containing single-use plastics, masks, diapers made a brief appearance.

Right on cue, WHO warns that hospital and medical waste is a danger to people and the environment. Did we need to be told? Supposing the COVID-19 pandemic were to vanish after Valentine’s Day, how sure are we that the aftermath of our carelessness wouldn’t trigger a pestilence born of polluted air and poisoned water? Already, an outbreak of diarrhea killing toddlers has been reported in Albay.