MANILA, Philippines — Four in five Filipinos have left their homes to buy food and medicine or do financial transactions at least once a week before the Luzon-wide enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) was lifted on May 1, a Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey has revealed.
SWS said that buying cooked or uncooked food was the most compelling reason why respondents left their homes more than twice before the survey period of May 4 to May 10, followed by purchasing medicines and doing financial transactions.
Almost all of the respondents left their residences to buy medicine or comply with their financial transactions, but they only did it once, the survey firm noted.
ECQ involved the imposition of rules that strictly limited people’s movements across Luzon in a bid to curb the spread of the potentially deadly coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes severe respiratory ailment COVID-19. Mass transportation was suspended and only those working in sectors deemed essential were allowed to report to work.
According to SWS, the percentage of people who went out to buy food was in fact slightly higher among respondents who live in Luzon at 84 percent, compared to Mindanao (82 percent), Metro Manila (81 percent), and Visayas (76 percent).
The same trend was observed in people who did financial transactions with 99 percent of respondents in Balance Luzon and Metro Manila leaving their homes at least once for this purpose, and 98 percent for those in Visayas and Mindanao.
The Department of Health’s COVID-19 tracker showed Tuesday that 9,234 of the 14,318 total coronavirus cases in the Philippines can be found at the National Capital Region (NCR), which is tagged as among the areas “high-risk” for COVID-19 transmission.
In comparison, Visayas has 2,155 cases while Mindanao has 440.
As of May 27, health authorities said there are 15,049 COVID-19 cases in the country, including 904 deaths and 3,506 recoveries. Worldwide, 5.601 million people have so far been infected while 350,755 people have died and 2.3 million managed to recover from the disease.
SWS said this survey and the previous poll they did were done through mobile phone and computer-assisted telephone interviewing to ensure the safety of their staffers and the respondents.
Some 4,010 working-age Filipinos, or those 15 years old and above, were surveyed. They were divided according to the proportion of populations within a locality, like 294 for the National Capital Region, 1,645 for Luzon, 792 from the Visayas, and 1,279 from Mindanao.
SWS noted that this survey has a sampling error margin of ±2% for national percentages, ±6% for Metro Manila, ±2 for Balance Luzon, ±3% Visayas, and ±3% in Mindanao.