It’s time to decongest crowded sitios

Remember how greatly disturbed we were when we saw last Holy Thursday that so many people disregarded social distancing rule just so they could buy ingredients for their binignit? Now we learned from The Freeman that Sitio Zapatera in Barangay Luz has been placed under strict quarantine rules and placed on lockdown after the area recorded three positive coronavirus cases as of Black Saturday, April 11, 2020, as confirmed by the DOH and the City Health Department. This was reported by Barangay Luz Captain Ronilio Sab-a last Sunday.

Authorities are now tracing the people the patients came in contact with. The patients have not shown COVID-19 symptoms as of Sunday but they were made to undergo a 14-day quarantine. The patients will be transferred to the hospital if they manifest symptoms. The lockdown means no one can leave the area and policemen have been deployed to guard the area’s access points. It was decided that Sitio Zapatera would be cordoned off from the rest of Barangay Luz and placed on lockdown as Zapatera is densely populated and the risk of transmission is high.

This situation should remind our Cebu City councilors that while today we are practicing social distancing, many areas within Cebu City are so densely populated that even if you impose social distancing, when they return home this will be impossible. For years now, we only decongest a sitio or barangay after a huge fire destroys most of the crowded areas. Perhaps it is high time that we learn lessons from COVID-19 to break up houses built so close together that people can hardly breathe.

I dare suggest to Mayor Edgardo Labella to create a task force that would study the forced decongestion of barangays or sitios that have houses built too close to each other. This was supposed to be the work of the Office of the Building Official but as I said we have to learn the lessons from this global pandemic and prepare our barangays and sitios to survive any future viral disaster, which is happening to us today.

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During our Holy Week quarantine we learned that China has imposed restrictions on the publication of academic research on the origins of COVID-19. Under the new policy, all academic papers on COVID-19 will be subject to extra vetting before being submitted for publication. Studies on the origin of the virus will receive extra scrutiny and must be approved by central government officials.

According to news reports “a medical expert in Hong Kong who collaborated with mainland researchers to publish a clinical analysis of COVID-19 cases in an international medical journal said his work did not undergo such vetting in February.

“This increased scrutiny appears to be the latest effort by the Chinese government to control the narrative on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 100,000 lives and sickened 1.7 million people worldwide since it first broke out in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December.”

The Chinese propaganda blamed the virus on the Wuhan Wet Market, which they ordered closed. But lately we learned that the first 50 contaminated COVID-19 patients from Wuhan have never been to the Wuhan Wet Market. So suspicion is very high that the coronavirus came from a Wuhan laboratory and was man-made.

In late January, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus praised Chinese officials for “the transparency they have demonstrated.” Despite the emerging consensus that Beijing has lied about its number of cases and deaths, WHO hasn’t yet said a discouraging word about the communist regime’s actions. This is why there is a very high consensus not just in social media, but even in mainstream media in the US, Australia, and Japan, that Chinese Communist Party is responsible for this global pandemic. While we are not yet on the blaming mode, but it seems that the world has targeted China to pay for the cost of this virus.