Roy Tang

Covid19 thoughts and updates:

• Previously: COVID19 Diary
• Since the government decided to shut down ABS CBN, me and my Tita heard Sunday mass today via GMA at 5:30am
• I went out once this week for a grocery run. Should be enough to last us for 2 weeksish. The grocery actually seemed less chaotic than usual.
• Early this morning (after the mass) I took a walk outside for the first time since the lockdown started. Previously I had only gone out for groceries and meds. Only for less than 30 mins, and only in our subdivision, walking up and down the street. It’s good to be walking again, although this short and limited route is quite boring and full of neighbor’s dogs barking at me, so I’m not too fond of it, but it’s better to get the habit started again since I’ve been feeling the fatness piling on due to the quarantine and the lack of exercise.
• Still no word on what happens to Metro Manila after the ECQ “ends” on the 15th. The mayors gave a bunch of options to the IATF that basically amounted to “whatever, we can’t decide”.
• there’s this great site showing the progress of different countries in battling the pandemic: End Coronavirus .org. While some of our leadership are claiming we have already flattened the curve, comparing our data to other countries shows we still clearly need improvement.
• The government is already preparing guidelines for when we shift to GCQ like only 150 passengers per MRT train (good luck with that!) and so on. This implies that they are leaning towards shifting from ECQ to the more lenient GCQ already.
• We really have no data to indicate that the pandemic is under control in NCR, so lifting the ECQ would probably be dangerous, if not outright foolish. That being said, another question is how much longer people can take being under ECQ at all.
• Social distancing in some barangays in QC went out the window today, as it’s the last day for distributing the social assistance funds to those in need. The QC government has had a lot of trouble distributing aid to their residents, which might be explained away by the sheer size of the city (and the fact that administrative support for a population does not scale linearly). I wonder what the statistics are re: number of government employees vs number of citizens per city in Metro Manila? In any case, large-scale logistics has never been the strong point of the Philippine government, at any level. This kind of chaos really holds us back as a society.
• Word has it that there were a lot of cars outside today, presumably people buying food to celebrate Mother’s Day? For us, we just held a zoom call with the grandkids as usual.
• As of today, we are at 10793 cases (+184 from yesterday), 719 deaths (+15 from yesterday), 1924 recoveries (+82 from yesterday). We’re still gaining more than 1,500 active cases a week, although a lot of those are now in the provinces. I’m not sure if there’s a data source I can use that shows the trends for NCR only? Reference.
• Worldwide, we are at 4 million cases and 280,000 deaths. A full 1/3rd of all worldwide cases and 2/7ths of all deaths are in the US, which is still raring to reopen for the sake of the economy. We might be watching a tragedy unfold slowly in real-time over there.