This time last week, we had just celebrated Christmas and looked forward to the promise of the coming year. We pondered the lessons of a difficult year and hoped that 2022 would be kinder, less traumatic, and more peaceful.
With horror, however, we saw how the number of fresh COVID-19 cases doubled, or nearly doubled, every day in the past week. As a response, the government is bringing us back to Alert Level 3, with its attendant guidelines and regulations. Once again we read about hospitals being stretched anew with patients sickened by the virus, the Omicron variant looming large.
All of a sudden our plans for further reopening the economy, holding face-to-face classes and resuming our social interactions are once again on hold.
What awaits us this 2022?
It is so frustrating to not have the answers now, and to know that this crisis is not going away anytime soon. We were all set to enter the “new normal,” whatever that is. Now it appears we are headed back to the “old abnormal.”
Still, even though we are fighting the same virus as we were in early 2020 when COVID-19 first became a threat to our health, livelihood and our way of life, there is a significant difference between today and two years ago.
Then, we knew next to nothing about our unseen enemy. The virus was a mystery and we did not know how to distinguish between science and speculation. We acted out of fear of everything and limited all our actions, in a vain attempt to protect ourselves from possible exposure. Regulations were ill advised and changed from time to time, as our leaders offered conflicting versions of their methods of containing the spread of the virus.
We have seen sickness, death, loss, desperation, but also arrogance, entitlement, ineptitude.
Today, nearly two years hence, we should know better. We know which protocols are more effective than others. We don’t need to shun economic activity altogether but we need to know the conditions in which the virus is more likely to spread. We more or less know what to do when family members start exhibiting symptoms, and how we can boost our immunity. Almost 50 million Filipinos, after all, have been vaccinated.
This year is also an election year. May we see this not just a routine democratic exercise but as a make-or-break opportunity to install leaders who would neither flounder not panic, but who will be guided by science and good sense as we wiggle our way out of this pandemic. Which we will, for certain.
The year ahead seems far from easy. Let’s brace ourselves for it, and do so smartly.
