Kuya is still busy with the harvest and drying of the rice. It is hot and dry: The "Tag Init"(hot season) before the monsoon starts.
One of the farmer's daughter just died of Rheumatic Heart disease. A few years ago, they came here with (2 year old) cardiac ultrasounds and x rays, and asked what they should do. The scans suggested she was already in late stage Rheumatic heart disease from two badly damaged valves, and I said that what she needed was to repeat the two year old studies and have open heart surgery to replace the valves, but even then the mortality would be high due to the late stage of the disease.
But the family could barely afford to pay to repeat the simple ultrasound let alone the money for heart surgery, and although we often lend money to employees for medical emergencies, there is no way we could afford to help them pay for it.
Sigh.
So yesterday, the father wanted Kuya to lend him money so she could get hospitalized for oxygen and treatment, and asked him to take her to the hospital. Kuya was in the midst of the harvest and couldn't drive her with the truck, so he called an ambulance, which took a few hours to arrive because they are quite busy right now. Ambulances are funded by local towns and local politicians, so are free but for paying their gas money, and they took her to the public hospital in the next town, which is again free but you have to buy some of the supplies. Our our local city hospital is full and they couldn't afford the private hospital fee.
Well, anyway, the cook just told me that the woman died last night: she was only 30 years old.
Sigh.
The people here in our town include middle class folk who were getting able to afford a comfortable lifestyle, at least until Covid hit and destroyed the local economy. But most are mainly poor farmers and working class folks.
These have been most affected by the covid shutdown: when shops are closed, their owners and employees lose the ability to support themselves, and the other business in our town, upscale sandals, also is in a slump because people just don't want to spend five dollars on a pair of nice looking sandals so will make due with old ones or buy the cheap ones originating in China.
The farmers are also in a slump: We grow organic brown rice to the growing middle class folks, mainly in the Manila area, in the larger supermarkets. But again when the supermarket is shut or limited to customers, and money is tight, they will buy the regular rice instead, some of which is imported from other countries and keeps the price low, meaning our farmers are hurt. Ditto for onions and other vegetables.
Sigh.
People here are afraid to go to the public hospitals because of covid: There are isolation wards there but the real problem is that the ER and wards are full, many from routine problem, i.e. ordinary respiratory infections and from diarrhea. So we are asked for help to be seen in the ER of the local private hospital.
People here often can afford basic stuff but have trouble buying medicine. And with the covid economic crisis, the poor are having trouble affording rice, let alone high protein food, so their ability to fight off infection is low.
And of course what the US papers don't write about is the problem of the unemployed in the OFW who work on ships, hotels, construction or in the oil industry, etc. much of which is closed due to the economic slump. Our OFW often support entire families with their paycheck.
The latest "Fake news" is that China's military planned all of this. Actually, it was the US State Dept released a study that the Chinese military discussed releasing a SARS like virus for biowarfare, which is not quite the same thing.
Dirty little secret: The military is tasked to do all sorts of theoretical war plans, most of which never would be implemented. My favorite was that Jimmy Carter "'planned" to nuke Central Germany to stop a Russian invasion through the Fulda gap. This fueled the anti American German pacifists of course. But it was just part of a discussion of how such an invasion could be stopped: and since such an invasion was improbable, and our Nat Guard unit was tasked to go as backup and would die from the fall out if this was done, you can see it was more fanciful thinking than having anything to do with reality. Even MacArthur was fired when he proposed to nuke the Chinese invasion during the Korean war. But hey propaganda works.
But now who believes the news when the conspiracy sites let you know what is going on?
So did Fauci and the NIH fund the Wuhan lab to do risky experiments on the SARS virus because Obama shut down this type of work in the USA? That would explain a lot of the silence on why the real cause of the pandemic, i.e. the accidental release of the virus from the lab is taboo to discuss.
Only an iconoclast like Senator Doctor Rand Paul would dare to destroy the facade of lies from last year.
No, says Fauci, they didn't fund this research.
Ah, but here is how one Freeper discussed how this can ben done and hidden:
Money is fungible. CDC/Fauci could have funded other research at Wuhan in order to free up funds for gain of function research. Technically, that wouldn’t be funding gain of function but would have the same result. CDC tells Wuhan, we’ll send this money for you to spend on XXX, then you take the money you would normally spend on XXX and spend it on gain of function. Any bureaucrat knows how to play that game.
as for Fauci: he is a bureaucrat, and one doubts he is aware of everything going on under his watch. But he seems to be protected from criticism of the bureaucracy that slowed down testing and equipment because they followed the rules: and a lot of what Trump was blamed for was the creaky slowness of the bureaucracy and/or following Fauci's guidelines. I mean, it's almost as if reporters didn't watch the daily briefing on TV back then, and as if reporters weren't aware of how the government bureaucracy works (where rules are more important than reality).
Sigh.
The India version of Covid is now in the Philippines.
The news from India continues to be bad: It is so bad that more states in India are encouraging the use of Ivermectin as a preventive and treatment for the epidemic.
and some independent physician groups say it works: LINK
here, Ivermectin use has been a farce: The medical types for a long time forbad it, first saying it didn't work and then saying the animal version wasn't safe, and then saying hey we will do a double blind study to see if it works and we'll know in four to five months (ignoring other countries studies).
I'm not sure where it stand here, and I'm still not sure when we will get any of the various vaccines in our rural area.
since we have animals at the farm (even a waterbuffalo to plow one very wet field where the handplow tends to get stuck in the mud) I asked Kuya to check on buying animal Ivermectin but so far, the answer is no.
Sigh.
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unrelated item:
John McWhorter on the culture vs systemic racism. Like much of his writing it is nuanced so probably will be ignored or have him attacked by the TwittersphereRed Guards..
his lectures on language are excellent
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