Contracting COVID-19

In the other room, in broad daylight, a woman is relentlessly crying. Sounds of her sobs are almost muffled by the white noise of monotonous bird-singing nearby. I have almost missed this as, while in the room next to hers, I am busy contemplating the amount of food family and friends sent me and which I couldn’t possibly consume in two days.

I’ve tested positive for COVID-19, and it’s my 12th day in isolation today. I don’t feel anything, not even a slight itch in my throat, no symptoms to trace, nothing that would allow the nurses monitoring my health condition to process the necessary paperwork for my hospital transfer. Like many other asymptomatic patients, I’m housed in a government isolation facility somewhere in the outskirts of the town’s capital.

Over the past few days, the empty facility has been left alone to me. Five days into my quarantine, the other eight patients housed here have been cleared of the virus. They’ve gone back to isolate in their respective homes for a few more days. As for me, left alone without anyone to talk to, with the vicinity fenced to guard us like prisoners, I’m free (ironically) to roam around the small patch of land housing the facility. Contrary to usual local gossip about the shame COVID-19 has supposedly brought on those who have tested positive, I have never been calmer and more relaxed, and with a clearer mind, able to think through about the coming days awaiting me.

I have cleared all my work backlogs, submitted some grad school applications, sent out papers for academic conferences, and helped edit research proposals and essays of my friends. I have also begun writing for leisure; the number of drafts of poems and essays I’ve come up with is a small miracle to conceive in approximately two weeks. Maybe because, assured that my health is intact and that those who were exposed to me tested negative early on, I haven’t had the time to think through the contingencies of my mortality these days.

The woman is crying hard now and, though in a volume telling me she wants to keep to herself, it’s becoming deafening. Or at least, it feels like it. When Ma heard the news that I tested positive, she went home from the office crying, too. It was lunchtime some weeks ago, and while preparing the dining table, she was murmuring things about dignity. That we were stripped of our family’s dignity. That now that I’m infected, we can never shrug off the embarrassment of becoming the nightly news of the town, where, as cliché as it can get, everyone knows everyone.

In Budapest, which I left four months ago after finishing my master’s degree, we were calmer but also conscious of the fact that we could contract the virus from, say, just doing the groceries in Aldi or in Spar. Still, we could go out to have late afternoon coffee in the city center, or simply stay inside the confines of the Central European University dorm at Kerepesi, interacting only when cooking in the common kitchen or having wine late at night in the backyard exposed to the early fall. In April last year, a month into the lockdown in Hungary, most of us expat students panicked after receiving an email from the university rector encouraging us to go home if we still could, because of the worsening situation in the country. It was not really that worse compared to our home countries; my friends from Turkey, Brazil, and Pakistan had anxious feelings about how their governments could survive this pandemic. But talks went around that, as foreign nationals, we were one of the most vulnerable ones caught up in this situation, especially with increasing xenophobia in Hungary.

Mid-September, I came back to the Philippines uncertain about the risks I was facing. Manila was at the height of chaos (still is now), and I figured maybe it was better to stay in Hungary given the odds of contracting the virus and getting medical support. But my temporary visa was expiring, and left with no choice but to go home, I took with me all the emotional support from my family and friends and braved what could be a disastrous future, if indeed I’d get the virus in my own country.

Our health care system is not in good shape, further drowned by corruption allegations against PhilHealth. In the facility housing me now, I even had to ask if I could get a single room to myself so as not to expose and be exposed to others while rendering my quarantine time. Fortunately, they gave me one (with a comfort room inside), even if it only had a folding bed and I needed to bring in everything else to at least feel comfortable. Even the food service has improved now, after a patient complained on social media a week ago, lambasting the inefficient work of the Municipal Disaster Risk Office (which is in charge of food catering)—with repetitive dishes and seemingly half-cooked, low-quality rice from morning to evening, fed to patients like we were animals without consciousness, without agencies.

I’m almost done now with my quarantine, and in the next two days, I’ll be back home to finish the rest of my isolation period. I’ve quite enjoyed my daily routine of morning ruminations, drinking instant coffee, and reading a book I haven’t finished for a year now. In the afternoons, I write relentlessly. Life is good, and even with the chaos burdening our already problematic health system, I am still able to take the good out of my reflective time as a COVID-19 patient.

There’s little to no shame in it, only that from now on, I’ll be more cautious about my daily necessary interactions in town. And the truth about dignity is that, at some point, it just rests in one’s mind, the value of it contingent on how we want us to be affected by perceptions of it. People, after all, are moral beings who cry if sometimes they feel wronged, amid a judgmental society and a government that doesn’t give much to compensate for the tears and despair of its citizens.

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Ian Salvaña, 24, teaches politics at Ateneo de Davao University. He is from Cateel, Davao Oriental.

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