Cold front
With nearly the entire population of the world set to be injected with the Covid-19 vaccine for protection against the virus,
facilities and refrigerated trucks will surely be so busy maintaining and handling billions of vials for distribution across the globe.
Low-temperature warehouses and so-called reefers will play crucial roles in the cold chain to keep the vaccines potent, from production to administration.
When about 600,000 vials of CoronaVac vaccine from the Chinese pharmaceutical Sinovac arrived at the Villamor Airbase in Pasay City on Sunday afternoon, the reefers quickly went to work to bring the shipment donated by Beijing to the designated warehouse in Marikina City. Trucks were necessary because a large inventory of vaccines had to be moved. Such vehicles are usually operated by logistics companies.
The cold chain that is crucial to ensuring that the vaccines are maintained under a constant temperature not exceeding two and eight degrees Celsius also includes professionals monitoring portable freezers for moving a small volume of vaccines, and even backup refrigerators in case the electricity that powers cold storage equipment fails. Any slight anomaly in temperature in the entire cold chain process would render the vaccines useless and waste public funds.
Refrigerated trucks will be frequent sights as to be so familiar. Of course, they include those delivering food that also need to be kept frozen, like meat and fish. The former, though, will have priority in the use of roads like ambulances because they carry life-saving cargo.
An exception would be refrigerated trucks packed with unusual contents, like the one discovered by Bexar County police at a gas station in San Antonio, Texas, USA last 19 February.
When the cops arrived at the scene in response to a 911 call that people inside the reefer could not breathe, they saw about 50 illegal immigrants jumping out of the truck and dashing to the woods.
They caught dozens of the human trafficking victims and launched an emergency rescue for what they believe are 150 other men and women aboard the truck and smuggled in from the Mexico-US border.
While refrigerated trucks now play crucial roles in saving the human race by helping to protect them against the coronavirus pandemic, some, like the one found in Bexar, are life-threatening fronts for human trafficking. Unlike the Covid-19 vaccines that need a low temperature to be life-saving, the smuggled immigrants who escaped from the truck wearing light clothes, like T-shirt and jeans, while a winter storm was lashing Texas were in danger of injury, if not death, from exposure to the freezing temperature.