No preparation, panicked decision

Before President Duterte announced the lockdown in Metro Manila on March 12, he was scheduled to visit Boracay, supposedly to promote tourism in the country’s premiere tourist destination. What was the reason for the sudden change from promoting tourism in Boracay to announcing a Metro Manila lockdown?

There was no coronavirus epidemic yet in Metro Manila at the time to justify a lockdown. There were only 52 cases of infection and five fatalities, in a national population of around 110 million. President Duterte did not even take the COVID-19 threat seriously. He did not want to impose a travel ban on China flights even after Wuhan was locked down on Jan. 23, because he said it would be “unfair to China.” He also said “sasampalin ko ang veerus (I’ll slap that virus)” as if it were all a joke.

Senators Risa Hontiveros, Ping Lacson, Ralph Recto, and Joel Villanueva called for a travel ban on China flights after the Wuhan lockdown. In a congressional hearing on Jan. 30, former senator and now Antique Rep. Loren Legarda also reiterated the call for the ban. But Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said a travel ban on China cannot be implemented due to “political and diplomatic repercussions.”

President Duterte eventually imposed a ban on arrivals from China, Macau, and Hong Kong effective Feb. 3. However, what was very disturbing to learn later was that flights from China continued to bring in Chinese nationals, primarily tourists and those working in Pogos who returned to the Philippines from Chinese New Year celebrations in China.

When President Duterte later announced a Luzon-wide lockdown on March 16, there were only 140 cases of infection and fatalities of 11 persons. The Department of Health did not even declare an epidemic, unlike on Aug. 6, 2019, when the department declared a national dengue epidemic after 146,062 recorded cases of dengue and 622 fatalities. The dengue figures further spiked to 271,480 cases and 1,107 deaths by Aug. 31, 2019.

Going back to the question of why the sudden lockdowns in Metro Manila and the entire Luzon: Imagine the President announcing the Metro Manila lockdown on the same day that he was supposed to fly to Boracay to boost tourism there. Two weeks later on March 25, the President still claimed that he “is on top of this situation (COVID-19) at all times.”

An old friend of the President gave me an insight. “The government did not prepare for the coronavirus, hence, the haphazard decision for the lockdown.” On March 11, a day before the Metro Manila lockdown announcement, the World Health Organization (WHO) had declared that COVID-19 has become a worldwide pandemic. The Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases was given the WHO’s projection that the total number of infections in the country could reach 75,000 in five months if nothing was done. The Duterte administration apparently panicked, and thus the lockdown.

President Duterte followed the IATF’s lockdown recommendation due to the frightening projection on probable infections, and also because his administration did not prepare for the containment of the coronavirus. The government was not prepared with the testing kits required for mass testing. Only 1,296 had been tested as of March 20, compared to 15,000 in Vietnam and more than 300,000 tests in South Korea, which have helped flatten their curve.

Mass testing started only on April 14, about three weeks after 140,000 testing kits from China and Singapore arrived. They could have already started earlier and performed contact tracing and quarantine for persons in contact with those infected. This was what South Korea successfully did, but without imposing a lockdown in Seoul or any part of that country.

Those responsible for such neglect must be held accountable to the Filipino people, especially for the infections and fatalities including those of our health care workers. The contagion could have been contained even without a lockdown, if only the Duterte administration had prepared for mass testing much earlier, instead of two months later. The only epidemic we have is the incompetence and stupidity in government.

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Ricardo B. Ramos has been a freelance writer and columnist for the past 38 years since the early 1980s. He is the managing director of the Pilipinas Sandiwa Heritage Foundation Inc., which he founded in 1990.