"Whaaat is he doing," I thought, "trying to win some kind of most unpopular mayor title?" Those are four of the most elaborately-prepared city programs that have become iconic of Baguio City. Cancelling the Panagbenga alone rises to the scale of scrapping New Year's eve--like it could be done. Athletes competing in the CARAA have not only paced their training all year to peak at the precise time of the meet opening--they have even run some of the preliminary heats already when the shocking announcement came.
Saying that I struggled to give Mayor Magalong the benefit of all my doubt is an understatement. I seriously considered formally conveying my unsolicited cautionary advice to him: "this is political suicide, Your Honor."
 |
| Images of a ghost-town like Baguio such as this will become iconic of the period in its history when a mayor's strong leadership was able to coax 100% voluntary compliance with extremely harsh health and safety protocols. |
I'm glad I didn't. In my entire life, I have never been so happy to be wrong.
By this week's end, THIRTY MILLION PEOPLE on Planet Earth will have been infected by the coronavirus. Close to ONE MILLION PEOPLE would have died from the disease. These are World Health Organization (WHO) figures, confirmed by Johns Hopkins University.
Do the math. One death in thirty people is a fatality rate of 3.3 percent. Baguio's resident population in 2020 is 372,680. If we ever hit that fatality rate, we need to dig 12,298 graves if we can find an area eight hectares wide. Burnham Park is only five hectares. We need TWO Burnham Parks.
Back in March, the metrics of "superspreader" events were not even known yet. The mayor issued his order on March 9, 2020. The NBA in the US issued their order to suspend the basketball season only on March 11--two days later. The city of New York did not even go into full lockdown until March 18--more than one week later. New York, particularly, is a sobering comparison. A city of 18,804,000 residents, some 453,000 of them contracted COVID-19--an infection rate of 2.4 percent. If 2.4 percent of Baguio's residents were infected by the coronavirus, 8,944 of us would be on ventilators right now.
Out of the 18,804,000 population of New York, 32,682 have died of COVID-19 or a mortality-to-population rate of 0.1738-percent. If 0.1738-percent of Baguio's population died of COVID-19, we would be burying 6,477 people. But that's a misleading statistic. Why would you count the number of people who died against the number of people who did not even get the disease? You should count how many of those who did get the disease died from it.
 |
| Even after quarantine lockdown restrictions were slowly relaxed, Baguio residents continue to toe the line and give their city's political leadership total cooperation with living under the terms of the "new normal" lifestyle: social distancing and face masks. |
To make a long story short, if you "low-ball" it, 12,298 Baguio residents would be dead. On the other hand, if you "high-ball" it 26,832 would be gone if the pandemic were to end today. If it persists for a few more months--maybe even years--all bets are off. If might be easier to count the living.
So, no--Mayor Benjie Magalong did not commit political suicide when he made what I thought were crappy decisions last March. In fact, if he had not made them, he would have committed genocide.
I like to rub the exaggeration pedal-to-the-metal, so to speak. Donald Trump once claimed that he could go out on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and he would still not lose a single vote. Maybe, but if he shot ten people I doubt it.
Benjie Magalong could set up a 50-caliber machinegun in Malcolm Square and use up eight ammo boxes of 1,200 rounds each cutting down as many pedestrian as he can and he would still have killed LESS people than in the mildest COVID mortality scenario.
It is totally absurd, of course, but the fact is if he only spared one ammo box, he would still have saved 1,200 lives that would have died from COVID-19. That ridiculously makes him a "hero" of a magnitude not even Donald Trump can match.
CONTACT TRACING CZAR
Baguio City Mayor Benjie Magalong has been named the country's contact-tracing czar because of the city's tremendous success in limiting the spread of coronavirus, He was able to devise a way to break not just the linear transmission chain but to disrupt the fission-like expansion of the transmission web. He did this by adopting a reverse approach to containing an infection spread, by looking at viral transmission not as a function of population but of geographic area.
Other contract tracers around the world would follow one person and find out who that person had interacted with, say within the last 24 or 48 hours. If that person had interacted with two people, then the tracing steam was split and chased down these other two. This means the tracing team was always one step behind, and was getting thinned out with every cycle of infection-transmission down the line.
Mayor Magalong used a different strategy, which I describe as kind of "hamletting concept" for lack of a better term. He was not interested in just one infected person or who he interacted with in the last 24 or 48 hours. He wanted to know where he lived. Then his teams would literally draw on a map a large-enough radius, called the "hot zone." Then they set about interviewing not only that one infected person but any number of his neighbors to find out who had come in or gone out of the hot zone within the incubation period of the virus. As households were cleared one by one of any possible contact, the radius of the hot zone was gradually narrowed until eventually it zoomed in on the one house where that infected person lived.
In other words, Mayor Magalong's team would start outside the hot zone and close in, instead of starting from one point and moving infinitely outward as the web of transmission grew colder by the day. He also devised a very efficient handoff mechanism so that if one tracer team on the east side of the city determined that a possible infection contact had crossed over to the west side of the city, the details were forwarded to a team already in place on the west side. Teams stayed put in areas where they were assigned, where they knew every household, every point of ingress or egress, and where they knew practically every resident and his travel history. Most importantly, all contract tracing data were encoded into a database which printed out infection density charts in realtime. If infection had spilled out of one barangay because of smartaleck violators (the so-called "pasaways") Mayor Magalong locked down 2 or 3 more barangays surrounding it or shared a common point of ingress or egress with it.
Downtown, he required business establishments to log in all visits by customers, suppliers, staff--no body was exempted. He observed foot traffic and came to some amazing observations. He discovered that several infections in scattered barangays with no cross-traffic was due to a factor nobody could have seen: the infected residents had all passed though a narrow congested sidewalk in Mabini Street, where social distancing was all but impossible. He quickly split the pedestrian traffic flow into one-way ascending, one-way descending on opposite sides of the street. Almost instantly, the infection spreadout associated with the area suddenly dropped. In fact, he had already instituted the same system along Session Road earlier and wondered why the effect was minimal, until he realized that all the sidestreets need to be split-laned too, including Assumption Road and General Luna.
TOUGHER CHALLENGE THAN SERVING WARRANTS
Mayor Magalong was the former head of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG). During that stint, he had developed a remarkably efficient strategy of locating persons mingling among the general population over many years of forming elite "tracker teams" on the hunt for wanted fugitives.
But contract-tracing COVID-19 stretched his ingenuity to the limit. There's a huge difference between serving an arrest warrant and trying to catch a submolecular virus. When you're looking for a fugitive, you know a lot of basic information about his appearance and other physical traits that even if the person were to employ some form of disguise, he can only deviate so much from his basic appearance. CIDG tracker teams were equipped with up to five levels of cartographic variations, they hardly bother with less essential traits. A fugitive can't change his height or weight, only is face, hair and voice. Still, those are only three elements.
When Mayor Magalong set out to track down COVID infected persons, he knew it could be anybody with a million faces for a possibility. The virus has a million disguises--but just like the fugitives the CIDG hunted down, its modus operandi was well-known. The virus droplets could be aerosolized but strictly speaking it was not airborne. The virus does not fly. If it did, not even an N-95 mask can protect anybody, we would all need self-contained breathing systems and full biohazard suits. So the city went convent-strict with face masks not so much so you can't inhale the virus, but so you can't cough it out.
I discovered this first hand in town when I briefly peeled off my face mask to drink from a water bottle. Although the three policemen near me eyed me warily with raised eyebrows, they did not make a move right away. But when I let out a few stifled coughs after poorly swallowing the water, those three cops were instantly around me. They were not going to arrest me, they hardly even accosted me. One of them explained that they quickly formed a three-man wall around me so that the wind would not carry my aerosolized cough droplets. No wonder it is them who were clad in full white coveralls and industrial gas masks during the height of the ECQ. And that's the most prominent element of the Magalong plan: high enforcement visibility and marshall saturation. I have never seen downtown Baguio crawling with so many cops since martial law. And they were not shy or silent, either. Megaphone in hand, they recited points of the city safety protocols like they were going through the five sorrowful mysteries of the rosary. I was impressed.
The system Mayor Magalong designed, which is now being copied all over the country and even abroad, was a product of science and common sense--but that is an oversimplification. The system has so many fine adjustments and situation-specific variables, I dioubt if it can be completely and accurately replicated outside of Baguio City. It has multiple components, including methodology, data collection forms, database design, training programs, demographic studies, mapping studies, triage protocols---people who thought they could invite him for a one-day or even one-week seminar and be able to understand and implement a similar system are bound to be disappointed. The concept needs an indispensable element: Mayor Magalong.
Recently, I launched my own YouTube channel and I did a short video on the COVID-19 pandemic in Baguio, from another perspective. You can view that video by clicking the image link below:
NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:
Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON
