Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 373
Today is the first day of yet another new type of quarantine for those of us based in Metro Manila. It's mostly the same stuff with weird modifications like gyms still being open but religious mass gatherings forbidden. We're not allowed to leave the "bubble" area they've defined as "NCR+" but they still want people to take staycations despite the curbing non-essential travel. And people can leave the area if they're leaving the country it seems, so I don't understand how all those things work together.
Needless to say, things continue to get worse before they stand a chance of getting better. The Palace (or at least the people around the President, I expect) project that this latest measure should result in a 25% drop in new COVID-19 cases. Any reduction in cases would be welcome, of course, but I doubt that they can make any sort of accurate projections. the OCTA Research Group has been pretty much on the nose in their projections - if anything, we seem to be repeatedly exceeding their projections, leaving them to continually update their models and give us even scarier projections for the future.
In the meantime, we've only vaccinated about 300k health workers in the country when the numbers tell us that we should be vaccinating that many people in a day if we want to achieve some degree of herd immunity by the end of the year. We're not exactly off to a great start there and I don't know how our utilization of the vaccines donated to us thus far will impact future procurement efforts. I doubt it'll help our case given it does a terrible job of demonstrating we actually know how to handle this vaccine rollout.
In the meantime, Tobie and I will continue to be as safe as possible. We're weighing reverting to older ECQ-era routines like further limiting our grocery trips and definitely not eating out just to be sure. While we weren't exactly doing that a lot before, we're just going to double down on that for now while new case numbers remain quite crazy.
Stay safe, everyone.
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