MANILA, Philippines — Malacañang on Wednesday insisted that government has done a “good job” in containing the community transmission of COVID-19 despite having a high population density among Southeast Asian countries.
The Philippines, which has an estimated 106 million population, now has the highest number of COVID-19 infections in Southeast Asia with nearly 140,000 cases.
“We do the best that we can. Number one, we recognize that there is continuing community transmission and I’d like to point out that we’ve actually done a good job at containing it somehow given that we have the highest population in Southeast Asia, and I’m talking about Metro Manila in particular,” Roque said in an interview over CNN Philippines.
“When you talk of very high population density, you’re talking about sometimes in really dense areas the impossibility of social distancing. So we’ve been able to manage so far,” he added.
This was Roque’s reaction to Senator Risa Hontiveros imploring the government to enforce a “health-heavy” response to the pandemic as the record-high daily increase in infections reached almost 7,000 on Monday.
Meanwhile, Roque pointed out that the Philippines is only at number 22 worldwide in terms of the number of COVID-19 infections, doing better than countries considered as “role models.”
“Number two, relative to the rest of the world, we are in number 22 but we’re not as bad as countries that we consider as role models including the United States which now has the highest number of cases, the highest number of deaths,” Roque said.
“And even in countries of our own size like Brazil which is now number two or number three worldwide. We’re still doing a lot better,” he went on.
As of Tuesday, the Philippines has 139,538 confirmed cases, with 2,312 deaths and 68,432 recoveries.