By Netnet Camomot .
“Raindrops keep falling on my head."
“You can stand under my umbrella.”
“The sun’ll come out / Tomorrow / Bet your bottom dollar / That tomorrow / There’ll be sun!”
These were the three songs heartily dedicated to what happened in Cagayan de Oro on Monday afternoon about 5 pm when it rained cows and carabaos again and as usual they ended up clogging the city’s drainage system, leaving no space for the rainwater to occupy. As if Covid-19 and the pandemic are not enough. Whew.
Does the weather know there’s a pandemic? Can torrential rain decide not to worsen a worst-case scenario?
Life moves on and that’s what Monday’s weather proved. Sunrise, sunset, rain or shine, “You’ll always be / One in a million / My fantasy come true.”
Wait, where were we? Oh. The weather. “Blame it on the rain,” as the song goes. And blame it on Milli Vanilli founder Frank Farian for the lip-syncing that Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus did while performing the duo’s songs live. Er, not exactly live. Some other voices were used for those songs, making it difficult for Morvan and Pilatus to go live. But that’s a long story—let’s not go there. “Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?” That kind of story.
Leptospirosis is one more disease that a flooded city has to deal with. Add Covid-19 to that, and there’s the disaster cocktail which is absolutely different from Regeneron’s polyclonal antibody cocktail which was prescribed to US President Donald Trump to treat his Covid-19 woes.
Woe-is-me is an attitude that a Covid-19 patient and his family cannot indulge in if they’re keeping his illness a secret and can’t post it on social media. Besides, woe-is-me is the last thing anyone wants to feel amidst a pandemic that requires thinking out of the box while moving forward.
Still, Trump had no choice but to reveal he has Covid-19 since he’s the president of the one and only remaining superpower in the world. Unless “superpower” is now defined as the country that can send a virus to the whole world and cause a pandemic, then that’s China.
Anyway, even Trump doesn’t like woe-is-me posts for his condition. Instead, he turned his positive result into words of positivity:
“Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump administration, some really great drugs & knowledge.”
Yay?
Hmmm. Another song comes to mind: “Whoa! I feel good, I knew that I would, now.”
Trump left the hospital after a three-day confinement and returned to the White House where Covid-19 patients roam around, perhaps aiming for herd immunity. Trump, First Lady Melania, and some people who work there have Covid. With all that “positivity,” no wonder Trump now has a positive attitude.
Meanwhile, ordinary mortals who have Covid or are close contacts of Covid-19 patients are required to go into quarantine for 14 days. If they’re caught while trying to escape from the City Isolation Unit, Temporary Treatment Monitoring Facility (TTMF), or even the hospital, will they be allowed to use Trump’s positive attitude as an excuse? “Trump said, ‘Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life,’ so I’m outta here.”
In Cagayan de Oro, Covid-19 patients are allowed to leave the TTMF or the hospital only after getting negative test results. Otherwise they have to quarantine pa more which can last for several weeks if their test results are consistently positive. If you’re craving for that kind of anxiety, then go ahead and mingle.
CDO now has an average of 20 new local cases per day. Multiply that by 30 days, that’s 600 cases in a month. These numbers have not stopped the Cagayanon from mingling, though. As Dr. Joey Retuya reads the details—no names, no complete addresses—of each of the city’s new cases at the daily press briefing, there’s a Cagayanon having lunch with his officemates inside an air-conditioned room and they have removed their face masks and face shields because, well, how to eat with those on?
But Mayor Oscar Moreno remains hopeful as he wishes for a plateau to happen soon.
Flattening the curve. But some people who have been staying home are fattening their curves instead. Oh, well. Let’s eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we will eat, drink, and be merry again—but only with the immediate household. No visitors allowed.
I’ve been thinking of stopping my hard-habit-to-break of listening to CDO’s Covid-19 response daily press briefing. But this is where the truth and nothing but the truth is. So I’ll continue listening to that daily while playing Oil Painting. Or how about while singing this: “Rain / Feel it on my finger tips, hear it on my window pane.”
