As I dashed through virtually empty streets, panting for breath, a sense of solitude engulfed my being, my heart rising up in prayer, filled with gratitude, craving nothing else, only life’s small, unheralded pleasures.

In this state of serenity I marked my natal day.

It’s been a year since, and these days I am cooped up at home like countless others as the current global scourge ravages our pre-dystopian “normal”.

Amid the ongoing crisis, unspeakable grief tempers gratitude as life struggles to unfold. A sense of hope and faith races against a sense of foreboding, to take hold of a heart by turns weary and livid over lives needlessly lost – a poignant reality for the Philippines and its approximately 107 million people as the government’s dismal state of affairs is magnified on a grand scale in these precarious times.

Today, pleasant memories of just a year ago in that foreign city are quickly nudged aside by an ugly spectacle – of dead bodies mercilessly struck down by the powerful virus; of fallen medical front liners who stayed true to their Hippocratic oath until their lives were snuffed out by the coronavirus; of the poor desperately begging for help; of the destitute in the throes of death, being in the crosshairs of a government, lorded over by a president whose confusing policies and bumbling handling of the COVID-19 crisis are matched only by his meandering and conflicting pronouncements in his late-night televised addresses; of a people long deceived by political promises that will remain so for keeps.

The ensuing confusion and chaos during the initial lockdown of Metro Manila (a megacity in the island region of Luzon) and the “enhanced community quarantine” across Luzon in mid-March was an unmistakable illustration of the extent of thought and planning that crept into crafting this drastic, ill-conceived pandemic response by President Rodrigo Duterte and his administration. It also mirrored the government’s insensitivity to the plight of the poor, who were massively displaced in the unfolding shelter-in-place order.

By midnight of March 17, when the lockdown was widened to the entire Luzon, all hell broke loose in Metro Manila, home to a population of 57 million. Workers caught flat-footed by the announcement of the enhanced quarantine were stranded for hours on end at checkpoints, where massive build-ups of vehicles rushing to traverse the borders to nearby provinces added to the mayhem. Healthcare workers, direly needed in medical facilities but many of whom did not have the benefit of private transport, were left to fend for themselves at the onset of the quarantine. Government response to this need came as an afterthought.

With the lockdown firmly in place, violators of quarantine protocols, coming mainly from poor urban communities, are slapped with severe punishment.

Five young men found in breach of these regulations were thrust like animals into a dog cage. Alleged offenders from the LGBTQI+ community were made to perform lewd acts by a village official. Who could forget Duterte’s shoot-to-kill order in the immediate aftermath of the violent dispersal of a group of informal settlers who broke quarantine rules to demand help from a government that seemed to have forgotten them?

Such acts are par for the course in a nation where the government’s flagship war on drugs is pursued with brute force and wanton disregard for human rights, leaving untold numbers of suspected individuals dead and with no hope for justice.

Thanks to special powers granted by Congress to President Duterte in late March, rights to speech and free expression have emerged as collateral damage in the country’s disjointed and delayed response to the pandemic. At least a dozen individuals have been summoned to the National Bureau of Investigation on allegations of spreading “false information” on the coronavirus. Just what constitutes this putative infraction is as nebulous as the Duterte administration’s strategy to flatten the curve. With progressive mass testing having only begun on April 14, our country has chalked up 5,660 confirmed cases and 362 deaths as of April 17.

In the Philippines, like other Southeast Asian countries, the coronavirus pandemonium has become a convenient cover for clamping down on dissent. Cyber trolls linked to the Duterte administration are quick to pounce on their perceived critics, who find his pandemic response and the realities and needs on the ground seriously out of sync.

Under Duterte’s watch, cyber-troll armies have become big business in the Philippines. That the country has made the 2020 list of 20 Digital Predators in the world, released last month by Reporters Without Borders, comes as no surprise (Vietnam is the only other Southeast Asian country on the list.)

Not everything is dark and gloomy, though, amid life in the time of COVID-19 in the Philippines. Some local chief executives are demonstrating proactive and exemplary governance that contrasts sharply with the national government’s lackluster coronavirus efforts. They are a breath of fresh air in a nation inured to corruption, patronage, nepotism, ineptness, cronyism, and propaganda.

To many Filipinos the lessons held out by this raging outbreak are too glaring to ignore – and they are taking those lessons to heart. Hashtags like #OustDuterte and #Halalan2022 – referring to the general election two years hence, and an implied repudiation of today’s crop of elected officials, notably Duterte and his allies, have gone viral.

Today, as I turn a year older amid the rampaging pandemic, I still wish for life’s small, unheralded pleasures, but for my country, nothing less than massive structural change to upend our ailing political systems. Like deadly viruses, they have ravaged our nation for way too long. Flattening the curve in this regard is one long, arduous battle.

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Former executive director of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA), and currently an independent consultant to media organizations and select institutions in the Philippines and elsewhere in the region.