$0.0

President Rodrigo Duterte offers a P10 million grant to any Filipino scientist who successfully develops a vaccine against the corona virus. That might seem a paltry sum, considering what is at stake here.

There are dozens of laboratories around the globe, many assisted by artificial intelligence, trying to develop a vaccine. That is the Holy Grail of our time.

All of us hunkered in quarantine relish the day a vaccine is finally developed. That may not even happen. A host of deadly viruses haunted humanity for years without a vaccine found to terminate them.

The virus now devastating the global economy is a particularly difficult enemy. We are not sure if those who survive infection will be immune to it. Even if we produce antibodies to fight the infection, they do not seem to last very long in our bodies. Also, new findings show that survivors incur permanent damage in their respiratory system and other organs.

Nevertheless, we all hope a vaccine could be found to stop the spread. It is more comforting to cling to that hope rather than yield to the possibility there might, for a very long time, be no other instrument to fight this war except the sledgehammer of community quarantines.

This pandemic has upended our world. So many previously unthinkable things have happened. So many more will.

Oil prices, for instance, literally fell through the floor earlier this week. In the US, for a brief moment, suppliers carrying large inventories offered $-37 (yes, negative prices) per barrel for wholesalers to take their supply. This was because of a shortage in storage capacity. That shortage will persist.

Two weeks ago, Donald Trump boasted he helped get Russia and Saudi Arabia to end their price war and cut production levels to stabilize the commodity. The so-called OPEC+ countries humored him by agreeing to cut production by 9.7 million barrels per day.

That was, to be sure, a staggering and unprecedented cut. But global consumption demand had fallen by over 30 million barrels per day. The arithmetic here is not complex. The world still has an oil glut. We will surely run out of storage for the oil produced. That happened early this week.

In the main exchanges, US oil was trading at under $10 per barrel. Brent crude was selling under $17.

Countries such as the Philippines and China that import nearly all their oil needs should be celebrating. But a look at the secondary effects of this very low price regime will make us shudder.

Low oil prices will hit the US the hardest. At prevailing price levels, America could shed hundreds of thousands of jobs in its oil sector, beginning from the shale oil producers who labor under higher production costs.

Countries such as Saudi Arabia, nearly entirely dependent on oil exports, will be brought to its knees. This week, the Saudis offered Yemeni rebels a ceasefire. The rebels took this as a signal to tighten the screws.

Venezuela’s tyrant, Nicolas Maduro, offered the democratic opposition he has been trying to crush for years some sort of unity government so that they may jointly crush the epidemic. Venezuela’s predicament is compounded by the fact that the Maduro regime is under severe international sanctions.

Wonder of wonders, Microsoft is now advocating free and open data. The company has amassed a fortune over the years by amassing data and selling it.

The world as we knew it is rapidly changing before our eyes. Things that were outrageously unthinkable a few weeks ago now make sense.

Extension

Two important things happen today.

President Duterte will make that difficult decision about extending, terminating or modifying the Luzon-wide “enhanced community quarantine.” In Manila, a “hard lockdown” will be imposed on the entire district of Sampaloc.

The “hard lockdown” is probably an easy one to make, although it requires a tremendous amount of political will and executive adeptness. Sampaloc has the highest concentration of infected persons in the capital city. The decision to lock it down for 48 hours will give the rest of the country valuable lessons about isolating neighborhoods where the virus is running rampant.

There should be a way forward from the Luzon-wide quarantine other than an across-the-board policy freezing movement. The particularities of every locality where infections break out should enlighten tailored responses.

Over the next few days, we should see a major scaling up of rapid testing capacities, especially with the laboratories acquired by the Philippine Red Cross led by Richard Gordon. We should be able to map this epidemic in greater detail.

The large isolation facilities are now ready. This should allow us to shift tactics from wholesale “community quarantines” to patient-specific isolation. We may now take out infected persons and assign them to isolation facilities. The infected should be prevented from infecting others.

The island-wide “quarantine” was a necessary step arising from the sheer scarcity of testing kits. Now we should be able to quarantine persons rather than the whole island.

The more we know about this epidemic, the smarter our response should be. For instance, it is clear now that the hospitals ought to be our last line of defense rather than the frontline.

The first line of defense should involve strengthening the immune systems of individuals. We need a comprehensive program for strengthening our people’s immune systems for a battle that could last for years. It might work better to mass distribute vitamins rather than cans of sardines.

Still, the more we know about this virus, the more perplexing it appears to be.