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“This decision affirms that the government has fundamental shortcomings in meeting the basic needs of citizens amid lockdowns."
“It pains me to see (tarpaulins) of politicians and partylists claiming to represent our voices, even using images of nurses to boost their campaign. But the truth is, most of them were nowhere to be found when we were fighting for our rights and welfare,” Filipino nurse Pauline Budy said.
"Testing remains as the vital link to the rest of the public health strategies of contact tracing and isolation, in order to truly mitigate the spread of more infectious variants like Omicron in communities."
In the proposed budget, the epidemiology and disease surveillance program is set to receive P113 million in 2022. This is 33 percent lower than this year’s P158.6 million budget, and even way lower than the allocation set for this program before the pandemic.
Private schools have been hit hard during the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country, with a 50-percent decline in its enrollees for school year 2020-2021, according to the Department of Education (DepEd).
Once a beneficiary of a community pantry, 67 year-old single parent Beth Concha is one of the volunteers of Flag Brigade PH, an initiative started by labor group Defend Jobs Philippines.
Hopeful overseas Filipino workers bound to Hong Kong are asking the government for help as the repeated travel bans and flight cancellations have left them stranded here in Metro Manila, putting their work abroad at risk as well.
On August 5, the Philippine government’s pandemic response team put the province of Cavite under MECQ from Aug. 6 to 15. This is part of the supposed efforts of the national government to curb the spread of the dreaded COVID-19, particularly its more transmissible and deadlier Delta variant.
To identify close contacts up to third or fourth degree, community health advocates said that contact tracing has to rely on an already robust public health system which the Philippines does not have in the first place.
Halfway into the week-long stricter lockdown in the capital, health workers are still in agony over their unmet demands, with the government failing to address their call to look into their health, economic, and social well-being as they combat the pandemic on the ground.
#DuterteResign trended on the Philippines' social media platforms, after the country's capital and its neighboring provinces were put yet again on a stricter lockdown.
"To match the standards of World Health Organization's positivity rate on a daily basis, We should be testing at least 130,000 individuals per day, at least 90,000 in NCR, at the current rate that we are going."
A year since the world’s longest and strictest lockdown was imposed, health workers here in the Philippines are still dying due to the dreaded virus – the latest is a unionist in a government hospital.
The Center for Women’s Resources highlighted that economically-insecure Filipino women have increased from 16 million in 2019 to an estimated number of 19.54 million in 2020.
"When it comes to public health and public funds, it is right and just for the people to be 'choosy' to make sure that government will procure the most number of doses to be able to vaccinate more people using the vaccine that is most cost-efficient and effective."
This year, the plight of health workers and the dire conditions of the country's public health system were highlighted amid the raging pandemic.
What Vietnam and Southern Korea have done to combat the spread of COVID-19 are exactly the opposite of what the Philippine government has been doing so far.
“We cannot accept the Court’s reasoning that it is barred from compelling the executive to protect the people’s right to health ‘in a certain way or to a certain degree’ and ‘no matter how dire the emergency’ when it is obvious that the current response is a huge failure and places our people’s health and safety in peril."
So, how does this contact tracing really happen? In my case, wala (none). It didn't happen. I hope this is an isolated case but if this is the norm in most cases, gets ko yung sinasabi ng matanda na we just wait for a vaccine. For the meantime, use gasoline to clean your face masks but do not add fuel to the fire.
With the Philippine government set to provide the next wave of aid for pandemic-hit Filipinos, residents of urban poor community Payatas in Quezon City said they received none since March.
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