DILG Usec. Jonathan Malaya. File photo from DILG
MANILA, Philippines — The latest international COVID-19 report which ranked the Philippines at the bottom for the second straight month is “biased towards Western countries,” Interior Undersecretary Jonathan Malaya said on Thursday.
Malaya said that many of the 53 countries included in Bloomberg’s monthly COVID Resilience Ranking are western countries that are “welfare states,” while the criteria of the report is “very difficult to meet” for developing countries such as the Philippines.
This, Malaya said, puts the country at a disadvantage.
“In my opinion, it is really a biased survey towards Western countries,” he said over ABS-CBN News Channel.
The indicators used in Bloomberg’s report include vaccination coverage, containment of the virus, the severity of lockdowns, quality of healthcare, progress toward restarting travel, and the overall mortality throughout the pandemic.
Malaya also noted that the country is not the lowest in the world, pointing out that there are only 53 countries out of more than 200 countries in the world. He also noted that the country’s ranking is at par with our neighboring Southeast Asian countries.
“That is really unfair for the Philippines, while it did assess our neighboring ASEAN countries, it did not assess a lot of countries in Asia,” he said.
“If you will look at the result, we are together with our neighboring countries there,” he continued.
Southeast Asian countries remained at the end of the list, with Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines landing in the bottom six, according to the Bloomberg report.
Malaya, however, is optimistic that the country’s ranking would improve next month, with the country’s decreasing cases of new coronavirus, as well as the improving vaccine coverage in the country.
“We’re getting there. I would expect an improvement to the ranking by next month,” Malaya said.
In September, the Philippines also ranked dead last among 53 countries under the same report.