Today is the second day of the implementation of the district clustering system in the use of food and medicine (FM) passes as part of the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) protocols, announced last Sunday.
Those who are authorized to go out and buy essential necessities for the family should be mindful of the days they are allowed to leave their homes and where they should buy their food based on the cluster where they belong.
All these measures are designed to stop the spread of the virus which, as the health department said, requires more time, hence the extension of the ECQ. We foresee many who will find this quite inconvenient especially because the wet markets assigned to the cluster where they belong may actually be far from their residences.
One social media user expressed the “new scheme is subjecting you to more expense and more exposure by riding a taxi which is totally unnecessary. The timing is inconsiderate. No reasonable grace period was given.This is not all about one’s comfort zone. The problem with the clustering is some wet markets sell more expensive food and these are not fresh unlike Agdao and Bankerohan that your P1,000 goes a long way.”
Also, there are some areas, such as Cluster 3, that will be more congested due to more people going to the market. Times photographer Bing Gonzales has photos of the long queue in Agdao market that makes social distancing difficult to implement.
‘We want to comply and follow the rules but let us face it, it would really be difficult for some. Bottomline, we have to comply and abide no matter how hard it is and pray that we survive this pandemic with our sanity intact,” the post said.
So much patience and consideration are required from us during these uncertain times.
