Dumaguete has zero covid for a month now

The mayor is right.
As I've said before we have been lucky so far in and around Dumaguete, but even elsewhere on Negros things are still looking rather bleak. Since viruses don't care where Occidental ends and Oriental begins, we better hope not too many people decide to "avoid the checkpoints" and travel there/here anyway.
However, the thing to look out for is not so much how many new cases will occur, but how many of those stay in the "no idea how they got infected" category, because that would hint strongly at "local transmission", in other words, people walking around not knowing they are infected and spreading the virus.
If and when that happens we will hopefully have enough "instant tests" to make contact tracing more than a futile endeavour.

 

The feared virus seems to have weakened—people get infected but recover. But this is no reason to be complacent.

 

I agree. I don't think it has weakened, just our understanding of the virus has changed over the course of the last 8 months from high 'panic mode' in the early days to a 'less panic' mode as the recover percent notched up to 99+ percent. I was watching that number climb over time from the John Hopkins U, or other data feeds (worldOmeter, etc).

 

At the onset of covid-19 almost everyone infected by it died. Those infected needed to be attached with ventilators and later intubated. Thousands upon thousands of deaths were reported. Seems like that is no longer the case... leading some people to say that the virus has lost its original power to kill. People now survive or recover from the virus.

 

There are many reports of various new strains of the virus which causes Covid-19 - it is likely that some will be weaker than the original. Some might be stronger - but more lethal viruses often poorly spread.

 

How about the numbers that were published daily? The US, Italy, Korea, Germany etc had been giving us the number of deaths by covid since day 1 and they were really high. Hospitals were overflowing with covid patients. Mass cremations were done. It was overwhelming.