Numbers Affecting People's View of Coronavirus
As COVID-19 continues to take a toll on people's everyday lives, it can be visibly seen that its effects are slowly dwindling compared to when it first hit two years ago. One could say that the situation has become more controlled and tamed due to the numbers decreasing in the Philippine Coronavirus Statistics, but it has never been the case as new problems arise.
As more variants rise, more Filipinos become careless with the imminent danger wafting through the air as they continue to roam outdoors, leading to constant changes in the numbers as stated in the news reports from the Philippines to the Worldwide Health Organization (WHO). With the current issue of the widespread of Omicron along with other strains in the National Capital Region (NCR) of the Philippines, it is safe to say that the pandemic is nowhere near resolved. Despite the huge number of vaccinations in the country and its aid in preventing and reducing severe infections of the virus, it is clear that its public effect has become a double-edged sword as the numbers of positive carriers of COVID-19 continue to spike, as shown by the data released by the Department of Health (DOH), where the number of hospital admissions rose from 17% on December 17 to 23.5% by the end of the year 2021 due to some Filipinos skipping quarantine and other factors such as the holidays. The effects of the declination of the numbers in the last months of 2021 are also evident as most of the public starts to dismiss all the warnings and safety guidelines released by the government, and the positivity rate of the virus rose to 28% in NCR, according to a post made by Dr. Guido David on Twitter on January 1, 2022. In just a week, the 7-day standard of the positivity rate increased from 1.15% to 12.94%, and NCR is now classified as high-risk once more (David, 2022).
While data analysis and number presentations serve an important role in keeping track of the pandemic that has dominated the world and our lives in the past two years, it has been concluded that these numbers have a large impact on how the public sees the situation. Each rise and fall of the numbers has its own complementary reaction as well as the other factors affecting it. While the numbers presented in statistics aren't that accurate due to limited testing and complications in determining the causes of deaths and sicknesses in the country, they are without a doubt still highly influential on the numbers recorded in data with the extension of the citizens' reactions on a rather large scale, thus the effect and its continuous numerical changes. Warnings alone aren't enough if one doesn't possess the required discipline, as most people tend to be assured once numbers drop but become frantically anxious once numbers begin to climb once more.














