Dannah Karoline N.

Rivera
12:00-1:30 MW GROUP 5

Waging War with No Bullets: Philippine's Failed Response to COVID 19

Crisis

The main duty of the government is to ensure the safety and welfare of its
citizens. However, it has been months since the world has been struck by COVID
19. It has also been months that the Philippine government has showed its
inadequacy and incompetency in handling the pandemic which led to the
increase in virus infections and poverty in the entire Philippines. The
government's reaction has been reactive instead of proactive, while failing to
uphold transparency, accountability, and respect for human rights.

The first policy decision of the Philippine government was to impose selective
quarantine for returning OFW, but it was still accepting foreign travelers. Despite
the demands of the people to declare a state of emergency as soon as the
outbreak started, the administration did not respond right away. Strict quarantine
and travel ban measures were not immediately implemented. The Philippines
has one of the world's longest lockdowns in the entire world. Thousands of
Filipinos lost their means of income. Everything was put to a stop, but nothing
good happened thereafter. The spread of the virus in the Philippines is still
rampant.

Aside from the incompetency of the government, our health sector was at its
weakest. Our health sector was never ready for the pandemic. The government’s
health expenditure never exceeded 1.6 percent of gross domestic product (or the
country’s total economic output) since at least the mid-1990s. 1 In contrast, over
seven percent of GDP was allocated for debt service payments from 1986 to
2003. The government’s spending on health was only $42.40 per person in 2017,
one-fifth of the average among the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
member states and a mere 7.3 percent of the global average. There was an
inadequacy of contract tracing mechanisms, hospitals got too overcrowded,
hospital staff got infected, and the government's move is to only impose self-care
solutions such as regular handwashing, wearing of face masks, and social
distancing.

1
Quintos, P. (2020). The Philippines’ COVID-19 Response: Symptoms of Deeper Malaise in the Philippine Health
System. University of the Philippines National College of Public Administration and Governance.
The government's militarist approach also did not help at all. There was a
disregard and lack of respect to the ordinary citizens' human rights while those
who were in high governmental positions were able to violate quarantine rules
without being held liable. The government even had the audacity to pass the
Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 in the middle of the pandemic. Instead of mass
testing, there were mass killings. The government has never failed to red-tag
those who express dissent against the administration.

One of the greatest failures of this administration is the lack of mass testing.
Even after the declaration of the state of emergency, DOH has been continuously
insisting that mass testing was not yet needed in the Philippines. It was not until
April 14, 2020 that the government officially adopted a policy of “mass testing” for
“persons under investigation and monitoring, and high-risk patients such as
health workers, pregnant women and those with other medical conditions, such
as cancer and diabetes.2

Many lives were lost but the government has still continued to downplay the
threat of the virus and disregard the rights of the people. Priorities are misplaced,
while our debts are getting higher. Unfortunately, too many politicians are
focused only on re-election, causing them to make shortsighted decisions. What
the government should have done is to be proactive rather than reactive, to
prevent the local transmission of the virus from getting worse, and to improve the
health sector of the country. Indeed, ours is a chronically ill system and it is the
people who suffer the most.

2
Peralta, J. (2020, April 4). ‘Mass testing’ for suspected COVID-19 cases, high-risk patients only. CNN Philippines.
https://www.cnnphilippines.com/news/2020/4/4/mass-testing-for-puis-pums-high-risk-patients.html