Roy Tang

Covid19 thoughts and updates, June 21 edition:

• The other day, a friend who doesn’t keep up with the news much said that it feels like the pandemic is no longer an urgent thing, and I think that says a lot about the general atmosphere in these parts. This in spite of the fact that our case counts continue to go up, accelerating even.
• The president’s spokesman bravely says that at least we are doing better than the US; what standards, to be compared against the country with the worst response in the world. Maybe try comparing to New Zealand?
• This past week I had to take my mom to the hospital and some clinics a couple more times. Again, nothing major, just regular tests and consults that had been pushed back due to quarantine. I wrote about our first hospital visit last week. The smaller clinic we went to for blood tests had less screenings at the entrance, but all the med techs were in full PPE. Their building also had these nice foot-powered alcohol/hand sanitizer dispensers, pretty neat.
• Despite all of these precautions, I can’t help but feel quite a bit of anxiety visiting these medical facilities.
• Watched mass via Facebook again today.
• GCQ in Metro Manila extended until Jun 30th. Probably the minimum right decision, but it also feels like we’re just pushing back because we don’t know what else to do (because no mass testing, poor data management etc)
• As of last night, we are at 29400 cases (+943 from the day before, +4107 from last week), 1150 deaths (+20 from the day before, +76 from last week), 7650 recoveries (+272 from the day before, +1265 last week). Thankfully a lot more recoveries this week. Reference.
• Worldwide, we are at almost 9 million cases and around 466,000 deaths. Looks like we aren’t slowing down with roughly a million new active cases per week? Caveat: these numbers are from Worldometer.