So the president has continued his insistence of letting a vaccine dictate the end of his hold on the country. Disregarding the risk of rushing our way to it, or even the possibilty of not having one at all, there are reports of problem of dropping case numbers for some makers in the UK to get a good test going.

As of this writing cases in PH have climbed (disregarding the low death numbers), and whether this trend continues as we try to know whether this is the fabled "second wave," let's think of how the president will deal with the possibility that this short climb is isolated and will continue dropping while the vaccine is still a trial. Of course, assuming that he'll let Filipinos return to normal is too optimistic, he can't let this opportunity go to waste.

And based on the comments regarding this statement, everyone else has delegated their risk assessment to the all-knowing leader. Only a handful have dared point out the issue of how long everything has to halt for the sake of a vaccine, but oh please make us safe Mr. President.

What will most likely happen if cases start dropping and no vaccine is in sight is to rehash the old nth-wave scare, which can only go on for so long. With enough time people will realize these matters and eventually disregard the rules.

"But don't be complacent!" Is the new rally cry, as people do a slow return to civilization and every scaredy-cat fears that the stupid populace will think that the virus is gone and can go back to licking stuff and touching each other, as people usually do.

But really, there's reason enough to believe that the virus has petered out, and there's no need to fear any more. In fact, if this trend continues I can argue that even in the second wave there will be less deaths than recoveries.

If that's the case, what of the panacea that is the vaccine? If it does come out it might not even be as necessary as wanted, and Filipinos are still reeling at the last time an experimental vaccine was released en masse. Dengvaxia's caveat could have been fixed by waiting longer or putting it on the fine print, but good luck convincing every Filipino to take this new one.

There might be a good enough reason to believe that even without collective amnesia people will flock to the nearest syringe point. The insistence that this virus is really deadly has scared everyone enough that nothing else will convince them outside of a cure. To make matters worse, there are rarely any countering voices in the Philippines to matter. These two factors are enough to mingle with government reluctance to bring home the point of no return until vaccine, even if the official numbers say there's no need.

Well then, will the lockdowns continue? Not really. The welfare well will run dry, jobs will disappear, psyches will be wrecked and possible unrest can happen because that is just oppressive. So there will be a veneer of freedom but just enough to make sure no one complains. Stores will deal with limited capacities and lines longer than they should be, public spaces will be heavily monitored by magical pain lines. At least you don't have to stay in.

But the longing for the usual will prevail, and before you know it, no one is following anything any more. And soon enough this virus will be endemic and cause not even a blip in the lives of everyone. The government can't just lock them back in again; banking on the people being servile has its limit when they are no longer fooled

There is a solution, though: admit that this whole lockdown thing was an overreaction, a mistake, and open the country. The damages done by forcing everything to stop will be enormous, but alas, if you don't die of the thing, it doesn't matter. Now it has to.

Risk is everywhere, and no amount of safetying can imprison a people forever.

You might think that you're a member of society, that your purpose in a nation is to become part of it through participation, may it be through work, expression or any other means of exercising your citizenship.

But that was before the plague. Now you're just a possible risk, nothing more.

What is your worth now other than one more person who might succumb to a disease? Unless your importance has been arbitrarily decided upon based on what work you do, you're pretty much a liability. Ever since we changed the goal to total eradication of the virus we have been stripped of the things we used to do, for your safety since you cannot decide for yourself and tend to jump every cliff you see.

Why can't you be allowed to this or that, because you might get infected, that's all there is. It doesn't matter if the circumstances are favorable since you follow every metric, even if the chances of this dreaded transmission are slim anyway. There isn't even any clear idea on how the sick gets to you, but a microscopic thing like a virus does get tired at six meters or something and can't be bothered to go through a mask, just trust us on this.

There isn't even a dignity in being infected; unless you're a special case you're just another number in the graph. If you want your sickness to have meaning you have to be (1) young or (2) manage to get the virus in circumstances usually deemed safe. Outside of these, it's your fault for letting yourself get sick you heartless bastard.

If you do recover, a scenario more likely than you think, you better be too young or too old to matter. It doesn't even matter if your recovery results in more recoveries than deaths, there are still people who have the thing and more of the thing will come so no reason to celebrate yet, unless it's a cure.

And every death is a tragedy, but it's better to let every mourner cry in their own terms than to cram a camera in the room because look this guy died of mysterious disease outside of stereotype.

The main reason these outlier cases are reported is not simply newsworthiness. If you see a report of a kid dying of the disease, that would widen the scope of its victims in your mind; the trends stop to matter as this outlier tells us this thing doesn't discriminate.

Mind you, if perchance you get te virus but don't show any symptoms, somehow you're a walking risk even if you don't look any different from whenever you do get ill. All talk of asymptomatic carriers is just another form of the total disregard of your humanity by painting you as a risk even if you don't know it.

I don't want to get conspiratorial, but why is simple socializing punishable now? Is this a way to make sure that we only see each other as threats? Good luck with that, if anything, man's need for socializing will make this futile.

I started this with a want to write about how we're reduced to a possible infection, but really, are we going to let that be the norm?

No one has dared ask the most important question: What do we need to do to open the country?

Disregarding any statistics, death tolls, requirements etc., I will posit a theory I've cobbled up from various bits of stolen ideas: Lockdowns will end only if politicians will come out good afterward.

Here is the basis of this piece, but I have a bit of an addition to this in the form of the cure gambit, a heavy insistence on only resuming matters when a cure or vaccine has been found.

Let us begin with the information of a new virus, and cases have appeared in the country. You don't want to be blamed for letting people get infected and perish, so you take the only sensible measure you know to ensure little to no spread happens; you lock everything down.

The early pretext for doing so is that less spread means less cases, less beds to fill and less strain on the system. That's pretty fine, yes, we'll stay in.

But then new worries come, what if you open up and a second wave occurs (because you didn't let people get the antibodies enough, but that's a different matter, this virus is very special don't you know)?

You're very certain cases will rise if you open up, where the people will immediately start coughing at each other and lick every surface they come across as soon as they leave their homes. It's not like you've drilled it enough in their heads that this thing is really deadly and that you can stave it off with these things you recommend they do, and everyone's looking at the number of people who have had it instead of seeing those who have died or recovered; no one's the wiser.

Even if you accept the second wave, you can't exactly accept being blamed for any additional deaths caused by whatever fallout happens during the follow-up, if at all. You don't fear the spike as much as being seen as the cause. 

The alternative is stagnation and depression caused by forcing the country to stop, but even if you say all that is better than virus deaths, the resources needed to sustain handing out stuff to those staying in is not exactly unlimited. Your means of getting revenue are heavily limted, and the well is bound to dry up. Even if you do manage to find some money-making magic, not everyone is going to be happy to let their hard work go to waste, especially if your check is measly compared to what they used to earn.

Either way, you have to come out of this as a hero.

Maybe this is why no one has answered this question, because it will mean making a decision that doesn't only affect the nation, but with the person in charge. Is he willing to take the risk and let the people decide, or would he try to avoid the blame by insisting his way is the only way?

As a last card, you assure everyone that this has to continue, that you cannot fully relinquish your hold onto them, not until a cure is found. This disease is so deadly that the only way out is by eliminating it. Really, you've masked your fear of being blamed by trying to be a savior and hoping no one notices the shift in goalposts.

But when will this cure come? In the Philippines, a mass inoculation of a dengue vaccine caused a large controversy when negative effects came. The irony of the president being fully secure of reopening only on the availability of a vaccine is great. Then again that past vaccine is the last administration's fault, this one is going to work, promise.

Maybe as a compromise, you'll let people go back to their stuff, with additional rules to make it seem like something is being done to keep the inevitable climb from being steep. If things go bad you can just shut everything down and prevent any blood on your hands.

And thus begins the new normal, but by then the people ought to know better.

Nova Gallery Manila in Makati has closed its doors on February 28, 2020. Here is a piece I have written about the first and only exhibit I have seen in it.

MENAGE A TREATS

Peije, Cheryl Owen, and Raine Sarmiento's Diversity

Three artists, each with their unique topics, team together with a mix of ideas that meet together just as watercolor meets paper in Diversity. Personality, nature and possibilities gather together in this exhibit.

Owen's drawings harmonize women and nature, with portraits of women interacting with nature's various elements. One could think that they're pictures of goddesses of each of nature's seemingly sentient forces.

Peije, meanwhile, takes on a person's personality and visualizes them through faces and the additional details that surround them, telling a story that hides behind the straight faces, with the title adding a starting sentence to this tale.

Sarmiento asks questions that tickle the imagination and make us wonder. These 'what ifs' ask of eating without consequences, longer nights and breathing underwater among other questions. The answers lies within a portait and the writings on the wall, the most that we could speculate.

Each artists' contribution is unique in themselves, but Diversity unifies them, creating an exhibit that tells three ideas, but reads like a seamless story. With such artistic output, three is a crowd.