MANILA, Philippines – Over 3 months since the coronavirus outbreak grew into a pandemic, more than 51,000 overseas Filipinos have returned to the Philippines, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said on Sunday, June 21.  

The DFA said it has brought home a total of 51,113 Filipinos so far since February 2020, including 29,302 sea-based overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) and 21,811 who were land-based.  

The latest arrivals included Filipinos coming from Japan, Norway, Oman, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, United States, and Vietnam on Saturday, June 20. Aside from this, Filipinos from Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Macau also returned to the Philippines through DFA-chartered flights throughout the week.

The DFA said Philippine embassies and consulates around the world remain “fully committed to bringing home our nationals abroad amid the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The number of Filipinos returning to the Philippines is expected to rise in the coming months as countries continue to struggle to restart their economies.

Early on in the pandemic, the Philippine government had difficulty keeping up with the thousands of returning Filipinos who needed to undergo mandatory testing and quarantine. (READ: OFWs struggle through prolonged quarantine in gov’t ‘VIP treatment’)

The situation left many workers stranded in the capital region for weeks due to delays in testing, receiving results, and waiting for transportation back to their home provinces, prompting the government to promise it would bring home workers within 5 days after arriving in the Philippines. 

With no near end in sight to the pandemic, the Department of Labor and Employment estimated some 500,000 OFWs may be displaced and out of work by the end of August, with the number growing to about 700,000 by the end of 2020. – Rappler.com