By: Leandro M. Cornista
Teacher II
San Jose Integrated High School
In the public mind, the origin story of coronavirus seemed well fixed: in late 2019 someone at the now world-famous Huanan seafood market in Wuhan was infected with a virus from an animal.
The rest is part of an awful history still in the making, with Covid-19 spreading from that first cluster in the capital of China’s Hubei province to a pandemic that has killed millions of people so far. Scientists say it is highly likely that the virus came from bats but first passed through an intermediary animal in the same way that another coronavirus – the 2002 Sars outbreak – moved from horseshoe bats to cat-like civets before infecting humans.
May we see this as an opportunity for our country to invest in major research hubs in the Philippines for future pandemic-related cases so that we can continue to have concrete plans and quicker solutions in containing a virus of this magnitude in the near future.
The covid19 pandemic has put things into a halt during its peak. The way we travelled and enjoyed the pleasures of vacation has been stopped for a while. Due also to the pandemic, travelers monitored restrictions and complied with advisories issued by the local and national authorities. As the world still grapples with the drastic effects of the pandemic amidst the vaccination programs of each country, it is still safe to say that we must live with the virus such as what we had before, with many viruses that plagued the world in its history. We should remember that we people should learn a thing or two about what happened in this pandemic. “It is therefore with great hope that I declare #COVID19 over as a global health emergency. However, that does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat. Last week, COVID-19 claimed a life every three minutes – and that’s just the deaths we know about”, World Health Organization director general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently said.
