Me, worry?

WHAT does your EQ (emo­tional quotient) tell you about preparing for the end of ECQ, EECQ, GCQ, and their permu­tations?

I worry about Other People. I worry that they don’t worry about the probabilities of be­ing infected by or infecting others.

A second wave looms, pos­sibly more pernicious. Pub­lic health Dr. Susie Mercado warns: “There’s no going back to where we were before.” If those rascals who so blatantly, lackadaisically flout the rules of physical and social distanc­ing continue to look healthy while spreading germs and the coronavirus without a care in the world, what’s the future of the world?

In tandem with safety and health concerns, it’s principal­ly the economy, stupid, that we need to rethink. Starting with the dislocation of hundreds of thousands of returning OFWs, a bleak future. As Willie Buyson Villarama of Blas Ople country Bulacan notes, “They bought condos on installment, some will find themselves with no jobs and no income. Staying home is a partial so­lution to the pandemic, the permanent solution is a vac­cine.” But before that happens, those $-denominated trillion­aires poised to save the world “are destroying each other in social media,” going as far as “cornering research for a cure to favor their companies.” Great.

Butch Valdes, commentator and bee-keeper, is thoroughly unoptimistic: “This will not end next month. The world and the Philippines will face economic contagion. Under­developed, ill-equipped na­tions will face severe effects. We have to go into a para­digm shift…reverse globaliza­tion, abolish central banks and establish national banks, collapse the speculative in­vestment system (gaming) and push resources toward a physical economy. The US, China, Russia, and India must lead the world toward this change to save civilization.” In addition, public utilities must be returned to government control while “measures of growth change from useless GDP into per capita calorie in­take; e.g., per-square-kilome­ter power generation, hospital beds according to population, similar methods of measuring production of goods.”

The future will be a strange place. Can we see beyond the tip of our noses? Dr. Isabel C. Suntay shares her short-term worries: “Have we done enough testing in depressed areas? Do LGUs have adequate quarantine and isolation fa­cilities? (When) can we con­fidently say the curve has flattened?”