Roy Tang

Pandemic thoughts and updates, Aug 2 edition:

• We ended July with around 90k active cases. Despite the threat of sending Metro Manila back to ECQ if we breached the 85k mark, the govt did not push through. Over the weekend, this led to a clamor from doctors and other frontliners to have a “time out” of 2 weeks for the NCR, a temporary quarantine, to give the healthcare system some breathing room. The knee-jerk response from the palace was to say it wasn’t necessary, but they quickly flipped their flops and said the IATF would discuss it. Enraging people and doctors, a certain outspoken-on-social-media doctor tried to shame doctors for not being heroic enough, and a certain senator implied that we can’t afford it so frontliners just need to work harder and be more passionate.
• Watching mass via Facebook again today. Churches have actually been holding limited physical services, but in solidarity with the call for ECQ, they said they will temporarily suspend such services.
• I went to get some Jollibee takeout last Thursday; apparently they are already allowing limited dine-in customers, that seems unwise, eh. Was anxious the entire time I was waiting for my takeout order.
• As of last night, we are at 98232 cases (+4963 from the day before, +19820 from last week, huge jump week-on-week), 2039 deaths (+17 from the day before, +142 from last week, moderate jump), 65265 recoveries (+93 from the day before, +39513 (!) from last week, a miraculous jump). We hit record high daily deaths over the past few days, and the huge spike in recoveries is because the DOH decided to do a “mass recovery” of mild/asymptomatic cases that are already 14 days or older, supposedly in line with WHO guidelines. I can kind of see some logic behind this, but the communication was not handled very well. Reference.
• Worldwide, we are at around 18M cases (+1.8M from last week) and almost 690k deaths. Caveat: these numbers are from Worldometer.