The beggarly Bayanihan 2 bill preferred by the economic managers and imposed on Congress is much too small for the magnitude of the crisis facing the country. It makes health and recovery years away and farther than ever.
The Philippines has been in varying intensities of community quarantine for 124 days—a world record in terms of the longest lockdown response to COVID-19. But the fight against the virus is still far from over, and now it seems like the country is back to square one—overwhelmed hospitals, rising number of cases, and overall chaos. All those days in lockdown have been wasted because of the Duterte administration’s louche decisions and inaction on building up the healthcare system’s capacity for COVID-19 response.
The Duterte government insists that it is successfully responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. The reality is a little bit different – it hasn’t done enough, and is planning to do even less.
“This is an important contribution to IBON asserting its character as a legitimate organization that does not, never has, and never will have the guns, explosives, and other illegal items that are wont to be planted to justify spurious search warrants and bogus charges against activists and human rights defenders,” IBON executive director Sonny Africa said.
The government should release the revised infrastructure list immediately. As healthcare has become the priority, the government should add more social infrastructure like hospitals to help deal with congested health facilities. More socialized housing units could also help decongest urban settlements in the country and help prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
The country does not seem to be winning the war against COVID-19, but the government has remained indifferent to the impact of the pandemic on the millions of poor families, said IBON.
According to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), headline inflation rose to 2.5% in June 2020 from 2.1% in May 2020. Behind this uptick are price increases in: transportation, particularly tricycle fares; alcoholic beverages and tobacco; housing, water, electricity, gas, and other fuels; and communication.
The national government’s program of sending people back to their hometown recently came under fire for spreading COVID-19 in the provinces. For example, Tanauan town and Baybay City in Leyte each recorded their first respective confirmed COVID-19 cases last May 28. Both confirmed cases were among the first and so far only batch of beneficiaries of the Balik Probinsya, Bagong Pag-asa Program (BP2). Meanwhile, in the war-torn city of Marawi, nine confirmed cases are beneficiaries of the Hatid Probinsya program.
In many instances, the solution to the complex transport problems of Metro Manila lies in the physics of the problem, in the same way that dealing with COVID-19 requires medical science. But the Duterte administration has simply picked up its pre-COVID proposal of “jeepney modernization” and used the pandemic to justify finally pushing for it, amid protestations by jeepney drivers and the adverse impact on millions of commuters.
For the majority of poor commuters, what is more painful to see now is how the Duterte government, not backed by science, is on the verge of banning the traditional jeepney from the road forever and insisting that modernization is the cure.
