WHO failed us?

It was around this same time last year when I was glued to my chair at the table from morning to afternoon working on the finishing touches of my master’s thesis. It was a good final push before graduation in Taiwan over a month later.

I say good because I did the whole process with zeal. Thanks to the able guidance of my Taiwanese professor and thesis advisor whose mentorship allowed my paper to take form and run its course systematically.

The same thesis advisor contacted me last week and asked how I was doing in this time of COVID-19. A few weeks prior to the declaration of the Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) in Cebu, he encouraged me to turn my unpublished thesis into a manuscript for publication in an international research journal.

Converting a thesis into a journal article for a peer-reviewed publication is not that easy, to say the least. But my former professor promised to guide me along the process, just like he used to with my thesis. So we set deadlines, and the deadline for me to submit to him a draft for his review was last week.

Last week he told me not to worry for now about my deadlines. “It’s important you take care of yourself first,” he said. It was a relief hearing those words from him. It has been tough trying to focus on important things nowadays. Maybe we just have to grin and bear this ECQ, perhaps for a few more weeks, or God forbid, months.

How we got to where we are now is not something I would want to indulge myself in right now. I agree that the current priority is to unite and be in solidarity with several sectors in getting through this crisis. The government says 18 million poor Filipino households need some form of social amelioration ranging from P5,000 to P8,000 cash support. According to the Department of Social Welfare and Development, it is not only the poorest of the poor who need help. Informal economy workers, public transportation drivers, micro-entrepreneurs and producers, employees affected by the no-work, no-pay policy, stranded workers, along with many others --they too are badly hit by the economic repercussions of COVID-19.

That’s what my former professor in Taiwan probably read about the Philippines when he asked me about our situation here.

Yet what struck me in our conversation was his information about their situation in Taiwan. Everything is just about the same as it was a year ago when you came here, he said. “The students are still in class and are learning.”

So the question I have been avoiding these days came back to me: How did we get to where we are now? People in the Unites States, Italy, and Spain --those worst-hit areas of the developed world-- are probably asking the same question.

To be sure, countries with relative success in fighting off community-wide transmission of COVID-19 like Taiwan and Vietnam are still on their toes against this virus. But surely they did something right early on for them to afford to have a relatively normal life for their citizens while much of the rest of the world is in lockdown.

One of the things Taiwan and Vietnam did right was that they didn’t trust information coming from China and the World Health Organization (WHO) about the novel coronavirus during the early stages of the outbreak.

Meanwhile, much of the rest of the world took their cue from China and the WHO last January. Two months later, we have this catastrophic pandemic.