Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 56
As Week 9 quarantine comes to an end, the Metro Manila mayors met to discuss what their stand would be on whether or not their cities should remain under Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) beyond the current schedule of 15 May. But given it is the national Inter-Agency Task Force on COVID-19 that will make this call, they ended up just making a list of possible scenarios posted as "recommendations". Given this took them about 5 hours to rattle out and without a consensus, it just reminds us that a lot of our leaders don't have a clear idea of a strategy for dealing with this moving forward.
So their three "recommendations" are either to extend the present ECQ until the end of May, to shift to GCQ after 15 May and maintain it until "whenever necessary", or GCQ for Metro Manila with local governments reserving the right to lock down individual barangays.
Time and time again we come to the end of these announced quarantine periods and I continue to work under the assumption that things aren't going to back to "normal" any time soon. COVID-19 remains a clear and present danger based on the steady rise of infections in the country and our sadly limited capacity for running the tests necessary for diagnosing the disease. We all wish the quarantine would end but it only makes sense for it to end when we've actually flattened the curve and the government at least has a better handle on the disease even in the absence of an actual vaccine against COVID-19.
So yeah, I dunno.
Today we finally got to revive our Wraith: the Oblivion RPG campaign after more than two months of hiatus. We're still limited to playing online via Discord but it's better than not being able to game at all. Every game just reminds us all how much we miss being together around a game table. We just have to endure for now.
It's a Saturday night, and our post-game entertainment involves the fabulous O Divas of O Bar staging an online birthday show for Eken via Facebook Live. These shows are a technical challenge for the girls to manage given poor internet connectivity in different areas. But they're absolutely necessary given gathering tips online is now one of their main sources of income as entertainment and leisure industries like O Bar remain closed and thus they're without a source of income.
People know that we love the O Divas dearly and we try to support them as best we can even under current conditions. Plus these live shows do add a limited sense of normalcy to our quarantine routines. At the same time, it's quite endearing to watch the girls interact with one another - you can feel they genuinely miss one another and they also miss performing for live audiences at the bar. How can you not love them?
I miss them so much. I hope they get through this quarantine okay. They're amazingly talented and I wouldn't want to see all their hard work over the past few years to go to waste.
Comments
Post a Comment