"One hour at Mass in an openly ventilated church is certainly safer than one whole day at work in an air-conditioned office with a lot of social interaction."
As I write this column, we’re still waiting for the President to tell us the fate of Metro Manila for the second half of the month. Will we remain under GCQ, maybe even graduate to MGCQ, or—perish the thought!—slide back to MECQ or even ECQ?
The statistics aren’t encouraging. Today we hit over 500 fresh new cases of infection, compared to less than 200 just a couple of weeks ago. The UP research group that’s been tracking the numbers from DOH tells us that we haven’t flattened the curve yet, even after you wash away the statistical effects of additional testing and delayed reporting.
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As a result, people are growing more and more skeptical of the Department of Health, the lead agency of the IATF. Perhaps this is just the fault of a weak health system that the current Health Secretary inherited, as I’ve said before. Or perhaps the blame lies with some of his subordinates, as he hasn’t been shy about claiming. But regardless of the reason, the way he’s now doing his job is coming under a lot of attack.
It hasn’t helped that someone as respected as former DICT Undersecretary Eliseo Rio is now disclosing on Facebook that his resignation was accepted—five months later—because he opposed the way the DOH-led IATF proposes to handle the intractable problem of contact tracing. I invited Rio 20 years ago to join the board of a telecoms company I was helping to manage, and I have no reason to doubt his capability or his integrity.
Rio contends that he submitted a strategy for contract tracing that was endorsed through his boss, DICT Secretary Honasan and IATF chief implementor Galvez, both of them former military officers like him. His plan was straightforward: set up a data warehouse to process contact tracing data from all government sources as well as what he implied is a wide range out there of available mobile apps, together with a dashboard to monitor progress.
Getting data from every app available—that makes a whole lot of sense. But instead, the task force opted to go with a single application, #StaySafe, which to date has just a million users. Waiting around for that number to hit all 100 million Filipinos—now that doesn’t make sense. And we’re not talking here yet about how this application performs in terms of user friendliness or data collection, reliability and accessibility.
Someone had better explain this IATF decision to the public, and soon. It’s been nearly a week since Rio went public. The longer we have to wait for a response, the more suspicious we’re entitled to become.
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Here’s another issue on which the bright boys at the task force seem to have fallen asleep: the continuing prohibition of public utility jeepneys (PUJs) from our roads.
I’ve already complained in earlier columns about why it doesn’t make sense to prohibit jeepneys from feeding commuter traffic to, say, the newly reopened and refurbished MRT and dedicated bus lanes along EDSA. Without passengers delivered by those jeepneys, transport backlogs will remain, people can’t get to work, and the economy will just take longer and slower to recover.
I’ve already discussed before how open-ventilated jeepneys are still viable even under quarantine: with plastic partitions, boxes to handle paper money, even passenger logbooks for contact tracing purposes. Now a friend who used to work at Citibank has come up with another bright idea: Companies, especially the smaller ones, can hire jeepneys to serve as dedicated employee shuttles. This will require a lot of route rearrangements and re-permitting, but it can be done.
From the way he fast-tracked the planned Bulacan mega-airport as well as those EDSA refurbishments, the Transportation Secretary has shown he can move really quick when he puts his mind to it. We hope he decides to put this whole jeepney (and tricycle) issue on the front burner, if only for the sake of sparing the President the hostility of a substantial community of commuters, drivers and operators. As in golf, unforced errors are supposed to be avoided.
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My last appeal, again to the increasingly unpopular IATF, is to finally open up our churches to all the faithful (albeit at 50 percent capacity only, and with all the prescribed precautions). One hour at Mass in an openly ventilated church is certainly safer than one whole day at work in an air-conditioned office with a lot of social interaction. And if you’ll claim that worship isn’t as essential as work, you’re offending the 90-plus percent of Filipinos who’re Catholic, not to mention those belonging to other churches.
Last week I resumed my participation in one of the lay ministries of our local church, and even with an attendance of only ten, it was a joy for me. Catholics believe that physically taking the Host into the mouth joins them in full communion with Christ on His Cross. Accommodating this Sacrament, even just for one hour a week, is not too much to ask on behalf of that 90 percent.
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