"We’re hoping for a respite sooner rather than later."
"We’re hoping for a respite sooner rather than later."
We will soon be celebrating the first anniversary of perhaps the world’s earliest, longest and strictest lockdowns. Although the lockdown may have saved lives, the country paid for it dearly. One is an economy that has contracted 9.5 per cent which is the worst since 1946. About 30 percent of our labor force are still unable to find work and many are being retrenched. People also continue to die because of the coronavirus and in fact the death rate has gone up for the month of January.
We are still in some form of lockdown which will continue for the foreseeable future. Local travel is still restricted and if one must, health protocols are required before one can travel. Yet, daily infection rate has increased sometimes breaching 2,000 a day for 2021. To top it all, the UK coronavirus variant is now with us. This variant has been in the news since early December of last year, and yet it took the government sometime to impose travel restrictions on people originating from the UK. Even when the travel restrictions were imposed, the government allowed Filipino balikbayans from the UK to enter with minimum health requirements.
That was how those Filipinos from the UK were able to get in. When they were tested upon arrival and got negative results, they were able to go to Bontoc the following day and infected about 12 people when they celebrated their homecoming. I can understand that we cannot prohibit our countrymen from coming home. But because of the new virus strains, only Filipinos who are stranded abroad like seamen, Middle East workers wanting to come home and people who went on business trips should be allowed to come home but be stricter on balikbayans who are legal residents in other countries whose trips are non-essential like a vacation. They should be responsible enough to wait until the situation normalizes so as not to spread another strain of virus to their countrymen that is 70 per cent more transmissible.
Here we are following all strict government regulations in relation to the pandemic including the wearing of a face mask and shield, but if the government is not able to prevent the new strains from entering the country, it would be catastrophic.
The focus of the government is now on the vaccine. On this issue, the public has been getting a lot of announcements which are sometimes confusing and contradictory. The latest news is that the first tranche of vaccines that we will get is from the COVAX program of the World Health Organization and not from our own effort to buy them. No definite schedule is being mentioned as to when the purchased vaccines will arrive. I would also think that the public would want to know whether the local government units’ vaccination program are separate, in addition or is in coordination with the overall national government vaccination effort.
By now, there should already be a detailed plan and specific schedules but we have not yet seen any. We have just relaxed our travel restrictions which makes me wonder whether this is the right thing to do considering that there are now four new variants of the disease— the UK, South African, Brazilian, and California variants. Maybe this is all because of the economy. The economy, after all, needs to recover at the earliest possible time. But the National Capital Region which accounts for a major portion of our productive capacity continues to be on GCQ joined by the Cordillera Administrative Region and several provinces for a monthlong GCQ which will continue to negatively affect the economy.
How to move forward in order to revive the economy and still not make it so difficult for our people is of course the big challenge to our leaders. By now, I would think that they would have learned enough lessons over the past year to be able to plan and implement effective responses to new evolving situations without having to resort to trial and error solutions. The public will not complain if they have confidence in the decisions made by our leaders. During this difficult time, being honest with the public would be the best government policy. Truth, as they say, will set us free. Our leaders should therefore not underestimate the collective intelligence of the people. They would know if the government is lying, when mistakes are being made or if there is a coverup.
Let us remember that with all the hoopla about vaccines delivering us to the promised land, no shots have been administered to any ordinary citizen yet except to some privileged few. The last year has been hard for everyone and the public is hoping for some respite sooner rather than later.