Covid Guys
/Jojy Azurin missed watching “Crash Landing on You” with his wife. His chest heaved with severe coughs, and he had to be taken to the hospital. This was in early March, when he caught the first wave of the coronavirus that began to spread in Manila. He was 56 years old, a father of five children; his eldest made the frenzied calls to more than 20 hospitals in the capital to confine his father. The hospitals were full, and Jojy had to wait in the emergency room of Medical City for eight days before he could be given a spot in the Intensive Care Unit for proper treatment. He was patient #59 and he could feel death so near.
Jojy Azurin
The irony of it all was that he was working in the health care industry, running start-ups for medical technology. The doctors observed him with wide eyes: he was the only one who responded well, one of the patients who came out of the hospital alive. He attributed his miraculous recovery to his strong lungs, having been a runner familiar to the cadence of breathing. And it was a fierce mental battle that he had to fight to survive. The crisis had already taken nearly seven thousand lives. In the hospital room, he counted the seconds on the wall clock and hummed a mantra: “I’m going home.”
He is now well on his way in search of his entrepreneurial “Holy Grail,” a model for a software app that would put together a patient’s complete medical record and make it accessible to any doctor, from Batanes to Sulu. He knows he could do this, hopefully soon; he has always wanted to do this even when he was roaming local health units around the country for his work. His recovery gave him the startling effect of being more patient and tolerant. In provinces beset with poverty and armed conflict, the app would be a “universal storage” that would be easy for doctors to consult. They are mostly for people on the move, the less privileged ones.
The government’s strategy for coping with the pandemic cast the health sector in the sidelines, with doctors and nurses at one point demanding the ouster of the health secretary. President Rodrigo Duterte accused them of fomenting a revolution when they urged the government to revert to a higher level of quarantine as cases spiked in the weeks after lockdown was eased in early June. August recorded the highest of number of cases -- 6,000 cases daily [Ed note: latest figures, almost 8,000 daily]. Figures from the Department of Health were not done in real time, hampering experts from formulating plans. There was hardly any mass testing, and contact tracing was frightfully slow.
There is no reason for Jojy to stop his quest for life-saving medical information technology. Jojy was able to completely watch the romantic “CLOY” with his wife, but to him the real drama is in the everyday lives of Filipinos who are trying to survive, oftentimes barely.
•••
Ricky de Castro has a luxurious Porsche Cayenne, his dream car. He had no idea that he would be using it to transport LSIs in the midst of a pandemic. LSI, the acronym for Locally Stranded Individuals, ranged from overseas workers stuck in the capital and couldn’t find the means to return to their home province, to blue-collar workers who lost their jobs and were unable to return to their families. They were seen camping out under expressway viaducts, waiting desperately to be rescued from their predicament. Their situation needed the attention of the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF), the government body in charge of dealing with the pandemic. Ricky belonged to an informal council attached to IATF’s chief implementer, a former chief of staff of the armed forces.
Ricky De Castro in a basketball gym preparing the distribution.
From the start, the military was put in the forefront of the country’s response to the health crisis, but it had little impact. Behind the scenes, the implementer himself had to count on help from the private sector, and Ricky was one of those who linked up with the armed forces’ Leadership Development Center. The first order was to bring food to the poor. Ricky, 50 and a father of three, belonged to the corporate world of the Ayala Company, one of the country’s biggest businesses. He gathered his “social capital” by getting his network of big-name food corporations to donate. In the first weeks of the lockdown, they were able to distribute relief goods to as many as 300,000 families in the slums, with transport and manpower from the military. They came to use the expression, “I can move your goods,” borrowed from the Netflix series “Narcos,” only it didn’t mean drugs.
But politics also got in the way. There were internal rivalries, quarrels over resources, and bureaucratic delays among government agencies. “Let’s not get into it, let’s play with it” was Ricky’s team mantra to bypass difficulties that were affecting the flow of aid. They had to work around politicians instead of going at loggerheads with them, finding shortcuts and gaining access through easy channels regardless of the administrative chain, “in a safe way to establish a system.”
For three weeks between April and May, they were able to organize transportation for the LSIs assembled at the Villamor Air Base. They coordinated with a commercial airline, arranged flights on C-130s, and sought the use of the Coast Guard’s new boats, to bring home an estimated 5,000 LSIs. In this organized routine, there were Covid tests to be done, lodgings to be made, meals to be given out. Such a grand scheme, Ricky thought, should be written for a case study combining the Filipino culture of political maneuvers and resource management. “This is new,” he said. There was no template from previous disasters to follow.
The Coast Guard distributing aid in the slums.
The country had never experienced such a crisis since the Second World War. Government plans were often late and confusing. As the days wore on, another wave of massive LSIs trooped to a gymnasium no longer organized under Ricky’s team. The image showed a horrendous prospect of quick viral spread. Instead of getting health protocols, they were serenaded by a police band, supposedly to give them relief from their miseries. It was politics turned to entertainment to appease the population, with the president adding to it with his weekly near-midnight rants, and Congress handing down laws that were not always urgent during the pandemic.
•••
Usually, by around noon, Hernanito Olivar would have his parcel-laden motorcycle parked by the gate of the condominium building where I live. He would be one among dozens who would come and go, delivering and picking up all sorts of packages, including food and merchandise from online stores. They come riding in and out in their motorbikes, wearing helmets, geared up in sweatpants, long-sleeved shirts, or the flimsiest windbreakers (even during the long sweltering summer); and, of course, they were masked up to their noses in neck gaiters. I began calling them the Zorro riders without the capes, rescuing us from the drudgery of the quarantine. A delivery brought with it a bizarre sense of joy. There was excitement in leaving our four walls to come down to the lobby for Zorro. They’ve become a common sight in our small community.
Hernanito Olivar
This became the norm as the months stretched, although for Nito, he’s been doing this for nearly three years, the age of his second child. He lives in a poor section of the city, but he says life has been better than what he left behind in Masbate province. He delivers roughly 60 parcels a day and that would earn him a monthly income of about 30,000 pesos (600 US dollars). For a man of little means, he says that it’s good enough to support his family since they moved to Manila about ten years ago. Apparently, there is also a hierarchy among the riders; those given saddle bags or motorcycle boxes by their companies are a step up in their career ladder. If newbies accumulate points, they are given “gems” – extra incentives that can double or triple their average daily wage of 700 pesos.
A few hundred meters down the road from the gate, jeepney drivers in blue T-shirts wave ripped plastic jugs for alms, asking passing vehicles to stop and give a few pesos to help tide them over. Konting tulong lang po (Just a little help) – says their cardboard sign. The pandemic has sadly added a term to the social vocabulary: Ayuda, the dole outs given by mayors, ranging from rice and tinned sardines to pasta and snacks. While delivery riders are in demand, jeepney drivers are among the worst hit by the sudden slowdown of the economy, which has shrunk by about 16 percent. Thousands of jeepney drivers are likely among the 27.3 million Filipinos who have gone jobless because of the pandemic, according to a Social Weather Station survey last July.
As uncertain weeks rolled into October, Pulse Asia released its survey showing that President Duterte had an increased approval rating of 91 percent, which triggered intense debates that it was too good to be true. Was fear a factor among the respondents who couldn’t verbalize their opinions? Or did it speak of the Filipino psyche, of trying to survive in any way they can? We can’t tell our near future. We are merely told to wait for a vaccine that is not yet within our reach. So, every day, our Zorro riders, Hermanito Olivar among them, get to be the saviors in our condominium neighborhood.
Criselda Yabes
Criselda Yabes is a writer and journalist based in Manila. Her most recent books include Crying Mountain (Penguin SEA) on the 1970s rebellion in Mindanao and Broken Islands (Ateneo de Manila University Press) set in the Visayas in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan.
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