MANILA, Philippines — The office of home affairs on Sunday advised the public to defer travel plans for the Holy Week to help prevent further spread of the coronavirus.
Speaking for the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG), Assistant Secretary Jonathan Malaya urged Filipinos to put off their Holy Week travel plans until the infection rate has been placed under control.
Malaya said staying at home during Holy Week was one of two measures that the people could do to help prevent hospitals from reaching capacity and health workers cope with increasing COVID-19 cases.
Health standards
“We are calling on the public to first and foremost observe minimum health standards,” Malaya said in a radio interview.
“Second, now that we have a surge [in coronavirus infections] let’s defer all nonessential travel,” he said.
“I know that many have planned trips, but now is not the time for those—to go out, go somewhere, to mingle. None of those for now,” he said.
Holy Week is traditionally a heavy travel season in the Philippines, with Metro Manilans traveling to their home provinces to join their families in observing Lenten traditions.
Last year, Metro Manilans spent Holy Week with the entire island of Luzon on lockdown and interprovincial travel prohibited to stem the spread of the coronavirus.
This time, with a resurgent coronavirus, Malaya said, traveling is “not really advisable, because when we go out, it’s impossible for us not to come in contact [with other people].”
He advised caution to “protect ourselves and our families.”
A surge in coronavirus infections in recent weeks is putting pressure on the Philippines’ health-care system, with new cases hitting close to 8,000 daily.
Some in the health sector have blamed the surge on the reopening of the economy without waiting for infections to be reduced to manageable levels.
Economic managers blamed
On Saturday, Dr. Anthony Leachon, a former adviser to the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases, the temporary government body overseeing the Duterte administration’s coronavirus response, charged that the “economic managers set us up to fail.”
Leachon blamed the surge on the loosening of quarantine restrictions that the economic managers had recommended to allow businesses to return to operation, people to work again, and encourage consumer spending—with a view to turning the economy around from the 9.5 percent contraction last year, its worst performance in seven decades.
On Sunday, acting Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Kendrick Chua responded, saying the reopening of the economy had been guided by the need to strike a balance between health and socioeconomic needs and this policy would stay despite the surge in COVID-19 cases.
“We need to continue managing risks as COVID-19 cases rise. We do this by focusing on [local quarantines and dealing with] the sources of highest risk, so that the jobs and livelihoods of the majority [of the people] will not be affected,” Chua said.
Chua, who also heads the state planning agency National Economic and Development Authority, pointed out that “when we opened the economy [on] Oct. 12, 2020, [COVID-19] cases did not spike.”
“Nor did cases spike during the year-end holidays and the first two months of 2021. [New cases were] even on a generally downward trend. This was due to strict compliance with health standards and a gradual and careful approach to reopening,” he said.
Gov’t aid
Some health advocates have called for stricter lockdowns, including curbs on movement, but Marikina Rep. Stella Quimbo, an economist, on Sunday said lockdowns wouldn’t work without government aid for the people.
People, Quimbo said in a statement, will not comply with a stay-at-home order if the government will not provide aid to households, workers, businesses and local governments.
She said people in “no work, no pay” arrangements needed assurance of financing for their daily needs, and barangays additional resources if they expected to enforce lockdowns.
But the economic managers are cool to giving more doleouts because of weak revenue collection. Last year, the government resorted to borrowing to finance its coronavirus response, and sought loans to finance a vaccination drive this year.
“We will examine all available facts and weigh the knowledgeable opinions from domestic and international sources to arrive at a recommendation for action,” Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said on Sunday.
Chua said 3.2 million residents of Metro Manila were going hungry because of the yearlong lockdown.
“There are also 506,000 jobless [residents in Metro Manila]. Every day of general community quarantine costs people in [Metro Manila] and adjacent provinces P700 million wages,” Chua said.
Four million Filipinos were jobless as of January, he added.