Chess and Coping-Up with Corona

The local government units should stop sending health professionals to the checkpoints, the pharmacists, doctors, nurses and midwives.  The checkpoints should be manned by security people and the BHWs, the Barangay Health Emergency Response Team or BHERT or the so-called non-medical manpower. Those personnel in the checkpoints could easily facilitate or direct the people who have medical conditions or suspected to be having certain health issues. The health professionals will be outright exposed at the checkpoints and that is bad.

Like in the game of chess, the medical manpower are your key and powerful pieces. They have the power and moves that could well protect their co-equals (read: fellow health professionals in hospitals) and the King (read: patient; health measures) in the middle game or end game. When things come to worst, the immediate attendants of patients become patients themselves. That is a zugzwang, as what the chess players would call such situation.

True change in health care systems through the implementation of rights-based approaches to health must start with a reflection upon this present predicament the world is facing and must harness the existence and visibility of the health profession.

As every chess player knows, we cannot afford the virus to checkmate us or allow its pawns or thorns reached the last file and get promoted.

Sending the health professionals away from health facilities may exhaust them, and be tired enough to face and keep on the latter part of the war. Sending them to checkpoints discriminate them in a way.

At least as far as I am concerned as a fan of chess.

While in quarantine, my little chess player, Sophia, is polishing her games through the net. As what my good friend and her mentor Mr. Emmanuel Asi puts it, we must now adopt the chess master’s patience. Mr. Asi hopes that that those in the frontlines value patience in every stations they are deployed.

The great chess master Bent Larsen said: “Lack of patience is probably the most common reason for losing a game, or drawing games that should have been won.” This is the call of the time for our present-day heroes in the battlefields.

"COVID-19 cannot defeat chess,” said NCFP executive director Cliburn Orbe. “Our chess will continue despite the COVID crisis. We will show the world that chess is above all other sports because it can also be an e-sport played online," according to Philippine Star article last March 20, 2020.

Chess tactics, indeed, could also help us combat this pandemic.

But the chess players should also heed to precautionary measures from health experts: "Do not touch your face!" This habit of chess players is a no-no in this turbulent time of the pandemic.

"Of course we touch our faces. That much is clear,” Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, the No. 6-ranked classical chess player, said in French in an article published at the Wall Street Journal in April 22, 2020. “We have habits while playing that are impossible to break. Thinking with a hand on your chin or on your forehead is a reflex.”  Keep safe my chess playing friends!

COVID-19 for sure taught humanity, those into chess or otherwise, that we have bad habits to break for our own survival...

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(Photo: CTTO)