It’s a mess

On the eve of the announced community quarantine of Metro Manila, I was told that Annie, the gentle woman who does ironing for my household, would not be able to make it the next day. Her husband sent a text message saying the barangay was not letting anyone leave. So the operation had begun earlier in certain areas of the metropolis, I told myself. The next day, as though she were to blame for her immobility, Annie herself called on the landline to apologize. (In this day and age, she is challenged by a cell phone; she keeps the simple instrument bought for her by her children in the closet, wrapped in a handkerchief.)

Yet Annie was to travel only within Quezon City where both our families live. Her route required two brief jeepney rides, and she was usually at our doorstep by 7:30 a.m. (or earlier, were we early risers). Her barangay, which hosts a squatter colony, had apparently imposed a lockdown abruptly and would brook no window of opportunity for anyone to exit or enter before the scheduled time of midnight March 15.

The surgical mode of enforcement doubtless ensured more than one person losing a day’s wage, but then, what of it? As the Malacañang mouthpiece Salvador Panelo declared, incredibly, “No one dies of hunger. A month will pass and you won’t die of it.”

That mode was in stark contrast to the mode employed elsewhere, which allowed two days for swarms of Filipinos laden with bags, baggage, and babies descending on bus stations in their haste to beat the clock and decamp for parts unknown. The wait to get a ride out was, from visual and oral accounts, horrific—no social distancing there, no way to practice behavioral etiquette on the correct way to sneeze, etc. Likely than not, the raging river of departures dispersed the new coronavirus among those frightened by the thought of being trapped in the metropolis for a month (or more, there was no way of knowing), and, once free of it, in their destinations.

And for those for whom Metro Manila is home and workplace, the Monday-morning melees at various checkpoints displayed the administration’s incapacity to manage its community quarantine, with thousands upon thousands of commuters held up by the wait for a ride or for the temperature-check protocol. From accounts, there was no consistency in enforcing the requirement of social distancing in public utility vehicles, or in checking the papers that needed to be presented by those entering the metropolis. And many of the soldiers bearing long arms and demanding correct documents and acceptable temperatures from the citizenry seething from the long wait are themselves bereft of personal protective equipment.

The situation is tense and dangerously brittle. In Valenzuela City, according to an Inquirer reporter, a man was sufficiently provoked as to punch a police officer at a checkpoint. It’s a mess, in short, materializing from the sheer absence of leadership that guarantees efficiency where it counts most.

But is it any surprise that things are turning out scary? At a time when he was called upon to show everyone how it’s done, President Duterte blithely waved away the modern-day plague as something beneath him to even contemplate: “Sampalin ko ‘yang virus na yan.” At some point he bridled at the no-touch policy imposed by his Presidential Security Group, saying it was “OA”—overacting—and was caught on camera shaking hands with his fans and generally ignoring the social-distancing protocol insisted on by health authorities.

Meanwhile on the ground, the frenzy at the supermarkets and drugstores continue at this writing. The spectacle would be laughable if it weren’t so repulsive, with the instincts of self-preservation in those with money to burn and maddened by the thought of going without perceived necessities bordering on the criminal. At one supermarket late Saturday afternoon, the queues at the checkout counters for baskets—never mind those for carts—demonstrated the level of desperation among those with less, reflecting the sense of insecurity swamping the people: We must take care of ourselves because no one else will.

Now the quarantine has encompassed Luzon. There’s a crying need for the panicked populace to be soothed and reassured that someone’s got this. Perhaps someone like the sickly adviser of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the little-known Harry Hopkins, of whom Winston Churchill said: “He was a crumbling lighthouse from which there shone the beams that led great fleets to harbor.”

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