Multimedia

It’s going to be a different holiday season this year.

Countries around the world are grappling with a dilemma of whether to relax pandemic restrictions to allow people to celebrate the holidays. On one hand, there is fear that relaxing restrictions would cause a spike in coronavirus cases. In the US for instance, the coronavirus cases is already raging with daily cases topping 168,000.

The announcement last week by two US pharmaceutical companies that their vaccine candidates are more than 90-percent effective against Covid-19 has given us hope the pandemic will be contained in the coming months. The positive report bolsters the nation’s confidence to fully recharge the economy soon.

As the nation continues to grapple with a pandemic that has affected more than 406,000 Filipinos and has claimed the lives of more than 7,700, a cavalcade of typhoons and severe tropical storms have battered our country in a span of weeks.