IT REMAINS to be seen how “community quarantine” (a euphemism for lockdown) would arrest coronavirus. But would it not pale in comparison to a more harmful scenario that Communist China is capable of foisting?
You must have recalled seeing on TV President Rodrigo Duterte, flanked by police officers in Malacañang on Thursday, announcing his imposition of drastic measures “as a matter of protecting and defending you from COVID-19.”
Between March 15 and April 14, domestic flights from and to Metro Manila would be suspended. In contrast, international flights, including incoming ones from China, would go on.
And then he added, “You know President Xi Jinping, for all of his goodness to us, wrote me a letter and said that he is willing to help. All we have to do is to ask. Maybe there will be time, if things deteriorate, that I have to call on China to help.”
Was Duterte trying to endear China to Filipinos for hidden reasons?
The plain truth is that we are highly suspicious of that authoritarian state, mainly because she would not honor the 2016 decision of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) that the Philippines has exclusive sovereign rights over territories at the West Philippine Sea, such as the Mischief Reef and Scarborough Shoal.
Since December 2019, if Sen. Richard Gordon is correct, more than 500,000 Chinese nationals have entered the country, whether legally or illegally. About 4,850 of them came from Wuhan City and other areas of the province of Hubei.
If he were serious in keeping his constituents free from COVID, shouldn’t the President have imposed travel ban between the country and China in January 2020 yet in the wake of COVID’s outbreak in Wuhan City?
In fact, the first recorded COVID case in the Philippines was a 38-year-old female Chinese national who had flown from Wuhan to Manila.
Since then until yesterday, the Department of Health had listed 169 confirmed infected victims of COVID, 16 or around nine percent of whom have died. There’s none from Western Visayas.
In a country with a population of 109 million, does that justify lockdowns in Metro Manila and many other cities and provinces, restriction on land, air and sea travels, restrictions on parties and other mass gatherings with body contacts, “one-meter-apart social distancing” and reduction of vehicle passengers by one-half of capacity, among others?
No proof has as yet emerged on the effectiveness of the above in stopping the spread of the viral disease. What we have are confusing opinions on how it contaminates.
For instance, do we always have to wear masks and hand-rub alcohol in public places?
A mask is a must for COVID patients, doctors and other health workers who are on the frontline of the “war”.
But the citizens who wear mask when they don’t have to only succeed in keeping the commodity out of stock and in jacking up prices due to demand outnumbering the supply.
According to Professor Michael Knight of the George Washington School of Medicine in Washington DC, while droplets from a COVID may land on another person’s skin, it may infect the latter only when he rubs his own eyes, nose or mouth with contaminated hands.
But there could be more to it than unintended global menace. A Chinese renegade journalist in Hong Kong by the pen name of Miles Guo, recently wrote that the coronavirus that accidentally leaked from a Wuhan laboratory could have been “cultured” by the Chinese Communist Party to cripple the United States and its allies. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
