Not time to castigate

This article is not intended as a brief for Cebu City Mayor Edgardo Labella. In the past few days, our city has recorded alarming rise in the coronavirus infection as to reflect the country’s epidemiologic charts and consequently, our mayor has been on the receiving end of mounting criticisms. Some bashings are as harsh as the brutal demolition (six knockdowns in two rounds) inflicted by George Foreman on Joe Frazier in their world heavyweight boxing championship in Kingston, Jamaica on January 22, 1973. It is not improbable to surmise that these bashers hope to deliver a knockout punch to Labella’s political career.

Other critics though are as objective and clinical as the outstanding collective efforts of NASA scientists to bring back to earth the astronauts in the crippled Apollo 13 on April 17, 1970. While these critics do not have political considerations, they intend to point out where the mayor might have failed for him to rectify. In writing this column today, my objective is to share with you some  worldwide facts on the pandemic and relate the same with how the Philippines has thus far fared in this crisis.

I have taken efforts to get data from the internet from countries representing the various continents in the world. While the following figures are not guaranteed to be absolutely correct, I suppose they have been gathered with the best available technology to approximate utmost reliability. For some considerations, I have picked the COVID 19 data of Egypt, Mexico, Spain, Indonesia and USA. Egypt has 68,311 cases with 2,953 deaths. Mexico records show 220,657 cases with 27,121 deaths. Spain, which ruled us for about 333 years, registered 296,351 cases with 28,365 deaths. There are recorded 55,092 cases with 2,805 deaths in Indonesia while in the USA, there are 2,727,803 cases with 130,122 deaths.

Of this list, Indonesia, our neighboring country, has the smallest figure. Still, it has almost doubled the data of the Philippines with 36,438 cases with 1,255 deaths. Our numbers cannot even be compared with Spain because we only have about 12% of the Spanish cases. USA, the most advanced state in the list, is on top of my list. Our statistical data show that we only have about 1.3% of American cases and 1% of reported COVID 19 deaths.

These data, in rough and simplistic mathematical computations, reveal that the Philippines, with comparatively much lesser economic and technological capabilities than the rest of the countries in the list, is doing better in controlling the spread of the virus. Since certainly the Philippine figures include those coming from Cebu City, our city data should also be considered as contributory to the successful efforts of our country. In effect President Duterte and Mayor Labella, in leading our leaders, are performing well.

The pandemic is wrecking many societies. Our country is not spared. Cebu City is suffering not because the mayor. If some of his moves are slow or his decisions wrong, let us come forward and offer our help. Rather than subject our leaders to harsh criticisms, we need to cooperate. Individually, those of us outside the government can call our officials and communicate our ideas or better still offer to lead in making such thoughts operational. And our elected officials should stop ascribing bad image in our leaders. Let them put aside their political agenda. If we all be constructive in our ways, and support Mayor Labella instead of castigating him, Cebu City and yes, the Philippines will register a still better pandemic chart.