Let us play the devil’s advocate in the furor over Gwyneth Anne Chua, who reportedly infected a number of fellow guests in a restaurant where she attended a party.
Let’s take a look at it from Chua’s perspective.
She was found positive for COVID-19 on Dec. 27, one day after she was tested.
Chua came in from the United States on Dec. 22, and she checked in at Berjaya Hotel in Makati.
On Dec. 23, she attended the now-notorious Christmas party at the Kampai Bar after having had dinner at the Mijo Comfort Food restaurant.
At the Kampai Bar, she was allowed in after her temperature was taken, which was normal, and she filled out a health declaration form and presented a card saying she had been fully vaccinated.
What are we trying to drive at here? There’s a possibility that Chua was “clean” when she attended the party.
She could have contracted COVID-19 at the bar, or at the restaurant.
Chua allegedly bragged that she pulled strings when she was allowed to leave the Berjaya Hotel despite being under quarantine.
That information, that Chua bragged about her connections, came from Tourism Secretary Bernadette Romulo- Puyat. Who told Puyat that Chua flaunted her supposed connections to skip quarantine?
“Ang narinig namin nagyayabang daw siya dahil naka-skip siya ng quarantine. May mga connections daw siya (What we heard is that she was bragging that she skipped quarantine. She allegedly had connections).”
Note the word daw, Tagalog word for “they say,” which was used twice in Puyat’s statement about Chua.
That’s hearsay. Who knows, what Chua told her friends was probably different from Puyat’s interpretation of what she said to her friends.
Chua skipped quarantine by reportedly using her connections – isn’t that a sad commentary on the corruption or ineptitude in the government to which Puyat belongs?
Can you blame Chua for taking advantage of a corrupt system, which has been in place in the country since time immemorial? If Chua is to blame, so is the government’s corrupt system.
Again, what are we trying to drive at here? That the vilification she’s receiving from the public through mainstream and social media is extremely disproportionate to her mistake.
I won’t be surprised if the abuse she’s getting in social media will so affect her psychologically that she would contemplate suicide.
Already, some people threaten her with bodily harm, little thinking that they, too, could have done what Chua did in similar circumstances.
The same people would have bribed a traffic enforcer after being caught with a traffic violation.
“Ye hypocrites!” as Jesus of Nazareth told the Pharisees and scribes or learned men in his time. “You pretend to be pious, yet you are unclean.” Or words to that effect.
Hey, guys! I don’t know Gwyneth Chua from Eve. What I’m saying is that we’re overdoing the flogging of the girl.
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There were fewer deaths and injuries during the New Year’s Eve celebration than there were before the time that President Digong Duterte took the reins of power more than five years ago.
The citizenry has become more disciplined in welcoming the New Year than they were in years past.
The ban on dangerous firecrackers has been strictly enforced under the Duterte administration. Authorities were able to get to the sources of the deadly explosives.
If only the war on drugs had the same enforcement as the ban on firecrackers, we would not be having the drug problem now.
Authorities did not go for the jugular in trying to eliminate or at least minimize the drug menace.
They haven’t gone to the sources of the drugs in the streets – the drug traffickers, their protectors in the police force and the politicians who play footsies with them.
The Duterte administration has barely scratched the surface; it only killed street pushers who are mere soldados or small fry.
Pushers are legion, and killing them by the thousands, like what the Duterte administration has done, only bred more replacements. Street sellers are replaceable, as the government has found to its chagrin.
But had this government earnestly gone after the big fish by killing them and dumping their bodies in public, other drug traffickers would have left the country or found other sources of livelihood.
And there would have been a smaller number to kill because compared to tens of thousands of street pushers, drug traffickers and their politician and police protectors are not that big a number.
Among a herd of deer, for example, a solitary hunter shoots only the buck, the strongest in the group. The hunter can’t shoot down the entire herd because that’s impossible. Since one of Digong’s hobbies was hunting wild prey (at least when he was still Davao City mayor), he would have known that he couldn’t eliminate the whole bunch of prey.
The President chose the wrong people to implement his war on drugs.
The result is that Mr. Duterte is being made to answer for the deaths of several thousand small fry because there were so many of them, when the number would have been much smaller if they were the big fish.
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My friend in the United States told me over the phone that he, his wife and their five kids were infected with the COVID-19 Omicron variant.
The Omicron variant – which has filled many US hospitals to full capacity – is not as severe as the previous variants.
All of them suffered from colds and mild coughs, but that was all. They recovered in a few days.
Except for the toddler and the two other young children, all of them were fully vaccinated.
Even their supermarket employees were also afflicted but they, too, were not hospitalized.
The Americans who were treated in hospitals because of the Omicron variant were not vaccinated, he said.