Surge warnings

It’s been years since we’ve heard that term “surge” used for disasters — the last time as storm surges that accompanied Supertyphoon “Yolanda” (Haiyan) in 2013, killing thousands and leaving many more homeless.

This time, we worry about a COVID-19 surge happening in many countries, notably the United States and now the Philippines. The statistics released by the Department of Health, especially when put into a graph, ominously depict the surge, also described as spikes, mountain peaks compared to earlier claims of a plateauing of infections, the so-called flattening.

The surge of infection occurs as lockdown and quarantine measures are lifted or relaxed, which in itself is not a bad thing, except that so much of the movement of people and social interactions are happening with people still not well informed about the risks.

Dr. Edsel Maurice Salvana of the National Institutes of Health has come up with a very urgent warning about the virus becoming more infectious now and spreading more rapidly because of quarantine easing, but with very sober and calm recommendations on what to do. You can check his Facebook but his messages have also gone viral, sent out by texts and Vibers.

I wanted to come up with more specific warnings that affect us in our daily home and office lives, coming out of ongoing research which I’ve been directing at UP Diliman through a social observatory program. The project is called “Navigating Environments of COVID-19 Risk” and goes beyond the usual “underlying medical conditions” that are often cited for COVID-19 infection, e.g. hypertension, heart disease, respiratory conditions, and, lately, obesity.

Our social observatory research looks into how social and cultural variables converge to protect or endanger individuals and communities. It’s these social contexts that need to be addressed by the information campaigns.

I wrote the other week about the need for government not just to do more testing but also to improve contact tracing, which probes into the circumstances around infections: why they happened and how they spread. Just as important as doing the contact tracing is to publicize the findings, without having to mention names of people and communities.

Already documented locally are infections that happened during sabong (cockfighting events), parties (including birthday parties), and sports events (playing basketball and volleyball).

If at all picked up by media, articles about such infections are buried in the inside pages of papers; it’s doom-and-gloom statistics that are preferred for front pages.

The result is that people don’t see why such fun activities are dangerous. Given people’s cynicism about government, they think that officials are just being killjoy (“KJ”), depriving people of their remaining sources of joy and recreation.

I think, too, local contact tracing might have been missing out on karaoke. Before the lockdown, I had to bear with excruciating daily karaoke from a community, from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., near where I lived. Then several weeks of glorious silence. Starting around June, there would be outbreaks of karaoke that would go for about 10 minutes, which would then abruptly end. I would smile, knowing our very efficient Barangay UP Campus had sent in the “troops” (our tanod) to stop them.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say the tanod may have saved lives that way. If choir practice has been documented in South Korea and the US as transmitting COVID-19 (including fatalities), karaoke could do the same, especially because singers practically shout out their songs to get a higher score on the dumb karaoke machine, even as people huddle together while singing, sometimes crooning the love songs face to face, close up, with the look of love that viruses love.

Government, mass media, ad agencies need to push harder to explain why these group activities are high-risk for COVID-19. At the barangay level, we can have more interactive methods to help people understand the risks, explaining how far the virus travels through aerosols and droplets and then asking them to analyze relative risks for particular activities.

Most importantly, we have to reiterate the “formulas” for infection to happen: a person (or persons) with the virus plus activities that allow the virus to travel through aerosols and droplets, including cheering, singing, even talking.

On Friday, I will continue with more of the often overlooked COVID-19 risks in offices and homes… and introduce the concept of care fatigue.

[email protected]