Week Nine

"There are fresh new crises and there are stale old problems."

Rounding into week nine of the lockdown, things are starting to look up. [And, yes, for me it’s mainly because my wife finally made it back home after three months of being stranded in the States. Thank you, PAL!]

The curve of new infections hasn’t flattened that well or that long yet; we may have to wait until end of this month for that. But we always knew that flattening the curve was just one blade of the scissors. The other blade—the real reason behind the length of our lockdown—was to buy time for expanding our health system capacity, in order to support ever more mass testing as well as to isolate or treat the positives.

By that measure, we can now breathe a little easier because all the needed facilities are already substantially in place. We’ve also just passed the minimum target of 8,000 RT-PCR tests conducted per day. What doesn’t seem as encouraging yet is our capacity for contact tracing, which so far still seems dependent on cumbersome manual methods aggravated by the creakiness of local government.

We can only read with envy about the ability of, say, Taiwan and Korea to track people’s movements from their cellphones, collect data across many platforms, or get in touch with possibly infected people within literally minutes of the infectious event. We can only hope that our local telcos, led by visionaries with a heart like MVP, will lend their substantial resources and data to likewise improve our digital contact tracing capability.

The severity of our lockdown was inversely proportional to the capacities of our healthcare system. This isn’t about the capabilities of our healthcare workers at all—far from it, considering their untiring heroism. It’s about their small numbers (no thanks to the brain drain of medical talent we’ve suffered), their limited access to technology and equipment, the shortage of basic things like hospital beds, and a creaky healthcare bureaucracy that was unfortunately inherited by the current Secretary of Health.

I think our people understand this, which is one reason why they’ve put up with the indignities of a lockdown for so long. But their patience will eventually wear out. Enough reforms must now be put in place, not just to relax the lockdown, but even more importantly to deal with a probable second wave as well as to enforce the strictures of a “new normal” after the worst of the pandemic is done.

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In this new normal—among other things—the folks at DoTr will be requiring trains, buses and jeepneys to seat their passengers one meter apart (that’s a capacity reduction by two-thirds). Taxicabs can’t carry more than four people including the driver; tricycles can carry only one passenger; and motorcycle taxis (habal-habal) are banned outright. This forcible reform isn’t likely to be lifted until a vaccine is discovered.

At such low capacities, passenger fares would have to go up by as much as two times just to recover lost ground for the operators. But that high an increase would never be acceptable, especially with today’s low oil prices. Some form of passenger fare subsidy will have to be granted, perhaps shared between national and Metro Manila governments, and only until a new vaccine allows a return to “old normal.” But in exchange for getting this subsidy, bus and jeepney operators should be required to give back.

Because we shouldn’t waste a good crisis, we can use this one to force more reforms into our public transport sector. Clearly, it’s only a matter of time before the balance sheets of the operators give away under the financial pressure of operating at only one-third capacity. Gone are the days when bus drivers could wantonly hurtle down EDSA in a mad scramble for passengers. They will need a new business model. And subsidized higher passenger fares is just one part of the story.

Integrated dispatching of buses from different companies will reduce the mindless confusion on EDSA. Experts I know have also suggested restructuring bus and jeepney routes to optimize the number and physical distribution of those vehicles, based on many years of traffic data. EDSA is susceptible to volume reduction by making judicious use of a limited number of feeder roads. Regularly scheduled bus stops only at those junctions and other heavy on/offload points ought to be part of the package.

We could go even further and require drivers to be shifted from the “boundary” system to salaries. Ageing buses ought to be retired or replaced with environmentally safer ones, while excess buses could be relocated to the provinces. And that innovation called bus rapid transit (BRT) should be seriously explored because of the efficiency with which it utilizes street lanes as well as transit times.

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There are fresh new crises and there are stale old problems. One that hasn’t gone away since early the last century is the continuous rebellion being mounted by the CPP, its armed wing the NPA, and its NDF united front.

Over all those years, one generation after another of insurrectionists has hurled itself against the implacable walls of the Philippine state. One after another, they recruited high school students and out-of-school youth into their ranks, many of whom ended up dead or in prison. And all that time, the parents of these children could only look on, dumbstruck, silenced by the loudness of the Leftist rhetoric that’s been systematically echoed in our schools, churches, civil society and mass media.

These days, however, the parents are silent no longer. This week the Supreme Court will hear an urgent petition for writ of amparo and habeas corpus that was filed by Mrs Relissa Santos Lucena on behalf of her daughter, Alicia Jasper. The young girl was reportedly recruited into the NPA by—of all people—a sitting member of Congress, one Sarah Elago, and her colleagues in the party-list Anakbayan.

Knowing the deceptiveness of the Left, I wouldn’t be surprised if Alicia would have to be dragged by her parents kicking and screaming back to her family home. But that isn’t the point. The girl was—and probably still is—a minor when she was recruited, and therefore had no standing to make life and death decisions about herself before clearing with the parents. This in fact is where the CPP-NPA hits hardest: at the integrity and solidarity of the Filipino family, by encouraging children to willfully defy their parents.

We hope that the Supreme Court takes the side of the hapless mother in this case. And in 2022, when the next election rolls around, we hope voters think just a little more deeply about the kind of people—and platforms—they’re putting into high office.

Readers can write me at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com.