Dancing with the pandemic

I AM not sure what entered Palace spokesman Harry Roque Jr.’s mind when he said, “Some will say kinakailangan nating sayawan ang Covid-19. Kasi sa Pilipino, when you have to live with something, ‘sayawan mo na lang.’ Pero ‘yan po ang gagawin natin — sasayawan po natin; we have to deal with Covid-19.” (Translation: Some will say we need to “dance” with Covid-19. Because in Filipino culture, when you have to live with something, you just dance. That’s what we’ll do — we’ll dance; we have to deal with Covid-19.)

Roque appears to be deploying the resilience card. It is an appeal to the enormous capacity of the Filipino to find ways, innovate and survive, except that in this case it becomes a legitimation of what is obviously his problematic claim that we are winning the war against the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19). This comes on the heels of a fist-pumping Roque boasting that we have triumphed over the virus, twitting the University of the Philippines professors whose prediction that we would hit 40,000 cases by the end of June fell short, as if being short by a couple of thousand cases is something to be proud of. Now, we have yet to reach the middle of July, but we have already exceeded 50,000 confirmed positive cases of Covid-19.