COVID is getting closer to home.
For journalists.
Two weeks ago, the city’s oldest daily, The Visayan Daily Star, announced it was folding up temporarily.
Last week, it was confirmed that two local reporters have been infected by COVID19.
Even editors and staff of DNX had to undergo swabs for confirmatory testing after they were exposed directly or indirectly to one of the two positive cases.
This week, Bacolod woke up to at least seven mortalities, struck down by COVID last week.
Local health officials say at least seven died last week, two of them employees of the same office at the government center here.
The virus is spreading in Bacolod, the city of half a million people and the most dense in Western Visayas region.
The flu season is also here along with the strong typhoons and the dead season in the sugar industry when money in circulation is sluggish.
If the flu, bagyo and what some jokingly call as flu-pigado (pigado being the Hiligaynon word for hardship) are not enough, CoVID came into the mix and made it harder for people here long dependent on the sugar industry.
Tiempo muerto is here. It has become harder, lethal.
In the past, hunger and poverty was the only problem during the tiempo muerto.
Now, it is literally the season of death.
