Best Posts

So accurate. Lots of things are missed on this island so you just have to brave it and try. You will be told by the nice guards when you miss something. Just don’t raise your voice because majority of the people here are nice.

 

I ask for a booster with Johnson and Johnson in Bacong, already got Sinovac, the answer was no, not all are vaccinated yet, I understand and respect that

 

This will always be the case with communication - whomsoever owns and/or moderates it has to maintain a set of standards. These standards may be in part enshrined in law, so that communication does not become illegal. With privately owned forms of communication, such as this Forum, it is entirely up to the owners and moderators to set their own standards - it gives us two choice: 1) Follow those standards 2) Find another Forum.

I am sure this Forum was never designed to become a means of anonymously attacking other people. Also, it is not a monopoly as anyone can set up their own Forum and allow personal attacks if they wish - I am guessing that within a short time it would consist of a mere handful of members, all of whom derive joy from being nasty to each other. All the decent members, who seek information, share common ideas and hobbies, etc., would have left because that would not be why they joined.

I think we are fortunate to have this Forum and must respect its rules - going outside the Forum if we think we cannot post here as we please.

 

"Stupid is as Stupid does" aptly describes this thread!

Is a thread ever retired or does it remain for ever in Dumaguete Info. Forum? ....ready to be brought to life again <groan> by someone new complaining about living here.

Adjust to the culture and lets move on.

 

Thanks.

My "passion" stems from being a virologist and knowing something about the subject. I realise that if those who know nothing all listen to the anti-control brigade the World, including the Philippines, will now be in one hell of a mess

I am not alarmed as I know what to do - I prepared for this eventuality 10 years ago. I realise that people who had no masks and no knowledge of how to keep the infection out of their bodies were alarmed - so I advised wherever I could. The main reason that masks were originally decried by governments was solely because they did not have enough in most countries. They killed many people because they took no precautions for what was a totally expected crisis - only the timing was unknown.

I am not concerned for myself - as I said I know what to do, even if this virus was far more more contagious and lethal. My concern is for those suffering from the infection - some of whom got it from very irresponsible people who refused to follow safety rules (combined with the stupidity of governments) - and for the effects upon the World economy. It is not essential in life to be only self-interested.

My wish is that those who refuse to follow guidelines are the ONLY ones who get the illness, but unfortunately that is not what is happening. Those who consider themselves 'safe' are not always getting ill but are helping the innocents to get ill.

But surely it is the right time now (with some flights resuming) for guests in a country who do not wish to follow rules implemented to save lives of citizens to LEAVE and take risks with other people's lives in THEIR OWN countries instead. Sounds fair to me.

 

Hey, i appreciate your passion about this. same for anyone else here who is alarmed and concerned. since you would be interested to know i am willing to explain my take on all this. my first point would be that it seems that there is little agreement on the statistics about coronavirus. deaths due to corona are determined at the time of death as the cause. that is a fixed statistic unless someone goes back and changes it. what is changing is the number of people with the disease which i believe should be determined by reliable testing. so, the death rate due to corona is a function of positive cases and actual deaths. the Philippines "hopes" to have done a million tests by the end of july. that is less than one percent of the population, so the death rate is rather high because of the low test rate. the US has tested more than 10 percent of its population and the death rate is much lower in part just because of the different testing statistics. the CDC in the US revealed two weeks ago that they think perhaps half of all positive tests are "false positives". if so, that would mean the number of positive cases in the US is cut in half and the death rate would be doubled. in the US, nearly half of all covid deaths are nursing homepatients. as a former nursing home administrator, i can tell you that in a one hundred bed nursing home one or two or three people are carried out the back door every week. i made the family calls on that. are those nursing home deaths truly covid? all those people had comorbidities. its a sad truth that most nursing home patients are waiting to die. three states, new york, new jersey and massachusetts account for more than 40 percent of all covid nursing home deaths. why is that? there are serious people on both sides of the questions about wearing masks, or not wearing them. about letting herd immunity develop. about accuracy of need for testing. about the risk to young people. about the future of immunization. i am not cold hearted about covid, or the regular flu, or heart disease. i have worked in healthcare all my life. death is the price of being born. yes i believe we should do what we can about preventing unnecessary deaths and especially premature deaths. it just does not seem to me that there is any agreement on what that prevention should look like, and how it compared to the same issue with dengue and liver disease and seasonal flu. covid is just one more risk factor we all face in our lives. its new so its unknown, but running in fear is not the way to deal with it. people everywhere and perhaps especially in the Philippines also need to eat. if they starve to death but do not die of covid, is that success? the Philippines is the 12th most populous country on earth but has one of the lowest absolute death tolls attributed to covid. but its one of the poorest nations in asia. it cannot keep suppressing and destroying its economy at the expense of the rice bowls of its poorest citizens. we need to stop digging foxholes and trying to defend positions based on sketchy or inadequate information. we need to talk more about this and keep track of what is really happening. covid is going to take a toll, i can see that, but we cannot keep throwing our children out of the back of the troika to try to keep the wolves at bay.

 

I think Pompolino is right about the cause of most of the problems. It is simply bureaucratic behavior, you see it everywhere when dealing with government. You see something that doesn't make sense and ask the person to change it, but the default answer is always no. You don't get fired or get in trouble in a bureaucracy for saying no, you don't get more work that doesn't benefit you in any way for saying no and what doesn't make sense right now might have made sense at one time, but it can't be changed without authorization.

Staff is seldom given any leeway in the PI, that isn't how management thinks or is trained, they themselves probably have little leeway, so it all rolls downhill. The good news is, that like most things, things are getting better, although slowly. Probably the best thing to do is support those little islands of hope that you find and hope that others follow.