Will the Philippines survive the coronavirus pandemic?

Photo from Pharmaceutical Technology

By Chester B Cabalza

Blogger's Notes:
Commentary of an Academic 
(Copyright @ 2020 by Chester B Cabalza. All Rights Reserved).

From the almost 110 million Filipinos - there are 501 infected cases, 33 deaths, and 19 recovered patients today from the unforgiving coronavirus pandemic. The rapid spread of the COVID-19 in the Philippines is reshaping our tenacity to reform one of Southeast Asian nations’ poor yet elitist health care system.

Recent uptrend data of the dead and infected patients, whether tested asymptomatic or symptomatic disease, present susceptibility among Filipino elderly, frontline professional and overseas workers, and mostly the middle class in urban areas based from medical bulletin.

Historically, Filipino ancestors coped well with epidemics and did not suffer demographic collapse when the Spanish conquistadors colonized the Philippines, unlike the Aztecs and Native Americans had to agonize from the dreadful scourge of Spain’s microscopic secret weapon of small pox outbreak. 

The European disease of smallpox atrophied indigenous peoples’ numbers in the New World during the infancy of western exploration in 15^th century. The absence of natural immunity to smallpox of the Aztecs annihilated their population. Three centuries after, it was only in that period the first virus epidemic had ended through a revolutionary vaccine discovered by British physician Edward Jenner.

Studies showed that Filipinos in pre-Hispanic times previously acquired immunity to diseases through trading contacts with the Chinese, Arabs, and Southeast Asians. But the tropical Philippines’ collective disease history may suggest that Filipinos had more in common with Austronesians in the Pacific islands than in mainland Asia, and here comes the crusade in the current human-induced disaster of the coronavirus pandemic.

The COVID-19, now touted as a pandemic by the World Health Organization, offer a plethora of perspectives where local political culture matters in mitigating the deadly virus. The Philippines’ young population also suffers the curse of coronavirus with more senior citizens falling down, although below the global average of 3.5% of mortality rate, even with a strict call for a viral regional and in due time a national lockdown.

Recent call of the executive branch in the Philippines to give President Rodrigo Duterte additional power is in question but time is of the essence in saving more lives. Tightening of our national borders in all frontiers without the declaration of national emergency is a bravado act in itself for anti-pandemic work in an effort for an all-out campaign against the coronavirus to flatten the curve given a decrepit state of public health system in the Philippines.

Rapid urbanization and population explosion in current globalized world, in which the Philippines is guilty of the post-modern pains, made more emerging diseases susceptible nowadays as the rich and poor succumb to its terror reign. Thousands of viruses continue to evolve and mutate, adapting from patterns from animal-to-human to human-to-human transmissions.

The coronavirus pandemic that started from China has dramatically affected the world in virtually only few months and the giant neighbour for some geopolitical reasons now a close friend of the Philippines battles for its survival as well. It may be prematurely construed that the COVID-19 disease born from Wuhan in China is rapidly killing Europeans and Americans at a fast rate, perhaps due to zero natural immunity to the new and mutated virus.

A bouncing effect or recirculation process may occur that it may contaminate again the original epicentre if not adequately contained. The West now frightens the East as hubs of infection while Italy and the United States grieve from unprecedented rising death tolls, the biggest blow from unseen enemy after the two world wars. Out of fear, travellers from old and the new worlds are forcibly barred from entry or obliged to mandatory quarantine in many lockdown Asian cities.   

A courageous complete bloc access from hot spot countries of the COVID-19 rising fatalities is possible for Metro Manila if containment fails after the enhanced community quarantine. Closest to our geopolitical region, a grim yet unrealistic scenario can be done following modern hermit kingdom North Korea of locking down with no coronavirus infection yet or Mongolia’s sole infected case may be emulated if complete bloc access shall be enforced properly by the military and law enforcers. 

A month of enhanced community quarantine may not be enough despite the Philippines’ fragile economic resiliency. The world certainly copied Venice’s legal remedy of trentino (30 days) but increased the forced isolation of infected sailors to quarantino (40 days) where the medical word quarantine has been coined. But Italy aches in deep sorrow as the new epicentre of coronavirus pandemic nowadays as Cuban physicians arrive to help them combat the selfish virus.  

London lockdown and practice of staying at home for seven months occurred during the Great Plague of 1665, becoming the longest outbreak in human history. The English folks painted red roses in front their house doors, even writing a plea for forgiveness. Mass graves became a common practice to decontaminate the fallen community.

At that time when the Americans occupied the Philippines, the US government established the Culion Leper Colony, a former leprosarium located in Palawan, to get rid of leprosy in the archipelago. It was proposed as the sole method known at that time to isolate existing cases and gradually phasing out the disease from the population, although it offered patients to receive adequate care and medical treatments.

Today Filipinos’ mobility has been made easier by the presence of low-cost airline carriers afforded by the moneyed and ever-growing middle class. The hyper-concocted world in current world health emergency also enabled infectious agents, like a constantly mutating virus, to multiply rapidly and spread unpredictably. A significant percentage of local COVID-19 cases involve a lot of traveling, either in business or leisure.

With proper respect to anonymity and privacy of persons under investigation and infected cases, majority of stricken-ill and death toll of the COVID-19 patients in the Philippines come from financially capable socio-economic bracket. Most of them were confined and quarantined in high-end hospitals and reside from gated subdivisions in the metropolitan, mostly from Quezon City in Metro Manila. Self-confessed asymptomatic patients who underwent mandatory self-quarantine were senators and popular actors. 

Question on social mobility and inequality may hinder uncertainty surrounding the outbreak of the coronavirus disease in the country. As poor Filipino families in informal settlements rely to prayers and strong natural body immunity system, so as not to acquire and get infected by the deadly virus.

The Philippines is still seen as a country vulnerable to the COVID-19 with increasing number of infected cases. Now that major cases are found outside China, affecting particularly major African, European and Middle East cities, driving xenophobia and national lockdown, the Philippines and other global governments should craft new and clever measures by putting right policies in place to contain the pandemic coronavirus outbreak while many scientists still race to find vaccines to cure the disease, even with the availability of more than 60 kinds of alternative treatments and diagnostics shared worldwide.