THERE’S NOTHING GOOD about the coronavirus pandemic, but maybe there can be collateral benefits. For example, it’s already forcing people to use the technology that everybody should have embraced already.

Strong coronavirus measures today should only last a few weeks, there shouldn’t be a big peak of infections afterwards, and it can all be done for a reasonable cost to society, saving millions of lives along the way. If we don’t take these measures, tens of millions will be infected, many will die, along with anybody else that requires intensive care, because the healthcare system will have collapsed.

Currently, the country has a National Security Policy and Strategy (NSPS) that very few in the government and the private sector know about. The document fails to provide guidance and foresight in light of crisis and hazardous situations. This is a major factor on how the government now responds to the COVID-19 pandemic issue: the government offers no clear strategy on how to get out of this crisis.

During global health pandemics aided by hysteria, there is global economic slowdown, deep slowdown bordering on contraction (“negative growth”). Millions of jobs are lost as companies and shops either scale down operations or shut down. Some governments around the world adjusted to help the ailing and dying businesses and job creators via various forms of tax cut.

Whatever you believe to be true about life, one thing is for sure -- time passes whether you like it or not. The future cannot be stopped. And since the future is a mystery, many of us want to get a peek, or at least get the best possible guess, at what the future’s going to be like, to see if things will play out the way we hope they will.

It has been a week under the “enhanced community quarantine” -- enhanced because it now covers the whole island of Luzon instead of just Metro Manila; community quarantine because the original term of “lockdown” was a shutdown and wasn’t reassuring.

I am pleased to share with readers a post Christine Tang and I wrote for GlobalSource Partners (globalsourcepartners.com ) on March 18 on the potential economic growth impact of COVID-19 and on March 19 on the recent actions government has taken in the monetary and fiscal policy areas.

COVID-19 said it to the whole world: stay home. With the lockdowns of their communities, countries humbly said yes. It seems it is only in the Philippines that the term “lockdown” has been so fearfully avoided, but call it by whatever name, “enhanced community quarantine” is a lockdown -- both a lock-in and a lock-out, where plain quarantine is simply a lock-in. Whatever, just stay home.

This is alternative reading for those who need a break from corona virus-related news.

That all countries failing the test of beating COVID-19 is not an imagined fear. What we are seeing now is severe stress to the point of failure in all country health systems, regardless of preparedness.

THE WORLD is facing its biggest public health crisis in a century. Managing this crisis via a lockdown requires an intentional contraction of the economy of unprecedented proportions. This deliberate and unavoidable drawdown in market activity will put businesses at risk of destruction, with hundreds of thousands of Filipinos likely to lose their sources of livelihood. Many households will be plunged into poverty. Without assistance, those who are already poor will find themselves at the literal threshold of life and death as they battle both the virus that is ravaging their health and well-being, and the economic hardship that will almost certainly exact a social -- if not physical -- death. Even those who are currently economically stable risk joining the ranks of the vulnerable.

The global COVID-19 crisis has heightened interest in a 73-year-old novel by Albert Camus. Published in 1947 in Paris, France, The Plague (La Peste in the original French) is a fictional account of an outbreak of bubonic plague in the French-Algerian town of Oran.