What if COVID-19 never ends?

The mind can trick us into believing anything that one day everything shall come to pass, that the madness will soon end, and that the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse got it all wrong.

That one day we will be back in the sweet embrace of our pre-pandemic lives – exchanging boisterous laughter with friends; traveling to the ends of the earth; watching sunsets disappear into the horizon – ah... to feel truly alive again – visceral, mind-bending, lost in the moment.

But what if it doesn’t? What if this brutal health pandemic doesn’t end? What if this tiny, tiny, yet pestilent virus never disappears?

What if we continue to find ourselves running for our lives in this real life video game, like say, Plants versus Zombies, where the undead continue to break down our doors?

What if whatever defense we put up, this cunning virus continues to outsmart us?

When COVID-19 struck early last year, we thought things would normalize in a few months. But cases surged, lockdowns happened. When New Year came, the morning after provided a breath of fresh air, filled with hope and a promise.

The vaccines arrived this year, fueling our hopes even more; only to be toppled by another surge. But we stayed hopeful because more vaccines arrived... until a more contagious version of the virus appeared. Getting fully vaccinated didn’t seem to be the easiest ticket out of this mayhem anymore.

As I said, it seems like we’re all inside a real life video game, winning at times, only to see the virus outwit us once again. This war has become so complicated for humanity to fully grasp and understand.

Now, here we are again on another hard lockdown, our third in more than 500 days of lockdown, the world’s longest.

It is the first day of this third round and it is eerily quiet as I write this.I lean over the balcony and get a glimpse of the usually chaotic street below. It is now empty and closed with orange plastic barriers. Everyone’s “locked up” somewhere, keeping afloat, holding it up, trying to stay sane.

The world indeed is broken in so many ways nowadays, and life before COVID-19 seems many lifetimes ago. Each one of us has already lost someone, something, some life inside of us, because of the virus. And for others, the losses continue, like falling leaves, branches, and the passing wind.

The good news is that history has shown us that every crisis eventually ends. We are alive because wars and plagues came to an end.

This means that this pandemic will eventually be over, just not as soon as we hoped for.

Endemic

But the virus itself may never disappear, and it is time we accept that. COVID-19 could become endemic, always around like the common cold, as what happened with the pandemic of 1918 to 1920, which eventually morphed into the seasonal flu.

As tycoon Alfred Ty said in November last year, we must learn to live with the virus. I agreed with him then; all the more now, with still no end in sight to the pandemic in the near future. Singapore, in fact, just announced it would do just that.

For us, this means there’s no doing away with masks for the coming months just yet; years maybe; no crowded gatherings, no random hanging out with friends, no intimate conversations in one’s favorite speakeasies, no going back to how it used to be, at least for a little while more.

The existential anxiety that comes with this seems overwhelming, but it is better to prepare our minds that this might be a longer-than-expected gauntlet run, that the virus will linger, and there will be new variants.

Scale up and accelerate

Treating the virus as endemic means we need to scale up our public health system for a long term pandemic and increase the budget for state hospitals and health workers. We need to strengthen barangay health centers as well, so citizens have access to preventive medicines, nutrients, and vitamins.

We also need to accelerate the vaccine roll-out in an orderly manner, not in a way that it would be a super spreader.

We can use this lockdown to vaccinate more people, perhaps extend the vaccine hours. We have fully vaccinated 10 million, but still a long way to go to achieve herd immunity in this nation of 110 million.

We must also vaccinate the children who are languishing at home, their childhood and teenage years disappearing with the winds of time.

We cannot afford a hard lockdown every time there is a surge, so we must vaccinate faster, and hopefully beat the pace by which the virus spreads.

I know this is too much to ask from a government that is already overwhelmed and confused with what’s happening, but a stronger health system and more vaccines can really help us win this war.

Like the virus, which keeps on mutating into a stronger version of its last self, our response must also be better than the last because in this real life humans-versus-COVID-19 video game, the only way out is to stop making the same mistakes.

Iris Gonzales’ email address is [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at eyesgonzales.com