Even as Laguna province continues to post the second highest number of active Covid-19 cases in the Calabarzon region, health experts managing the Covid-19 situation in the country recently decided it's time to loosen that one final vestige of restrictions the pandemic has brought: the face mask mandate.
The Inter-Agency Task Force’s (IATF) recent recommendation that wearing of face masks in public places (except in public transportation and vulnerable persons such as those with “comorbidities”) has once again sparked debate on whether we really are on the verge of recovering from the worst of the pandemic.
After all, no matter what the authorities insist, life has really gone back to what people had termed the “old normal.” Frequent sanitation’s a thing of the past now, and so is physical distancing and contact tracing.
And no one even bothers to check vaccination cards, when just over six months ago the IATF itself has recommended that those who have yet to receive their booster shots should be barred from certain activities.
With the return of in-person classes last month (incidentally, the Philippines is one of the last countries in the world to let its children go back to school after the two-year pandemic), and with many of recorded cases now just mild to asymptomatic, it’s only natural that some sectors would want to loosen up that one last reminder that there’s still a global pandemic: the face mask mandate.
But even if the government does decide to loosen up the mask mandate, that doesn’t mean we’ll be seeing the last of these masks in the near future.
Remember, “loosening” the restrictions does not mean doing away with the mask mandate entirely, as the IATF had clarified. Should there be another wave of severe Covid-19 cases, it would probably be inevitable that masks will be made mandatory once more, such as what has been done in Europe and the United States.
And there will still be people who will err on the side of caution and continue wearing their masks in public places. Two years is long enough time for something to become a habit.
What’s clear now is that as we learn to live with Covid-19, we still need to exercise the basic precautions that we’ve been taught in these past years. There’s still that basic premise that we have to follow, that prevention is way better than cure.