Labor usec dies from COVID-19

A senior career official of the Department of Labor and Employment (Dole) died of COVID-19 on Sunday.

Labor Undersecretary Joji Aragon, 58, was the head of the wages and productivity, legislative, advocacy and internal auditing cluster of the Dole.

“She succumbed to cardiac arrest due to the dreaded COVID-19 this morning. It is believed that she contracted the virus following a procedure she underwent in the second week of December last year,” the department said in a statement.

‘Jewel’ lost

Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III said the Dole had lost a “jewel” in Aragon’s death.

Aragon had been the department’s longtime chief legislative liaison who guided the department and the agencies under it in voicing out workers’ concerns before congressional inquiries and budget hearings.

She also had been the Dole’s representative to the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking in Persons, facilitating coordination with other agencies to combat human trafficking.

Moreover, Aragon had been one of the country’s pioneer welfare officers, having served in the Philippine overseas labor office in Tokyo.

The Philippines has yet to acquire COVID-19 vaccines, and the Senate is looking starting Monday to see whether the government has a real vaccination plan. (See banner story on Page A2.)The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not yet approved any of the candidate vaccines, but has given the go signal for local clinical trials of the vaccines developed by the Dutch company Janssen and China’s Clover Biopharmaceuticals.

Emergency use permit

It is also assessing the application for clinical trial of China’s Sinovac Life Sciences and those of Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals for emergency use authorization.

On Sunday, the Department of Health (DOH) gave assurance that COVID-19 vaccines with emergency use authorization or full approval from the FDA would be considered “safe and effective.”

The DOH also reported 1,906 additional coronavirus infections, bringing the overall number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country to 487,690.

Quezon City reported the most number of new infections, 121, followed by Benguet (84), Davao City (82), Cavite (79) and Bulacan (75).

The DOH said 8,592 patients who had been quarantined for 14 days with mild or no symptoms had recovered, raising the total number of COVID-19 survivors in the country to 458,198. But the death toll rose to 9,405 with the deaths of eight more patients.

The deaths and recoveries left the country with 20,087 active cases, of which 83 percent were mild, 5.8 percent asymptomatic, 0.63 percent moderate, 3.7 percent severe, and 6.8 percent critical. —DONA Z. PAZZIBUGAN INQ