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When the Philippine government decided to place the entire Luzon on lockdown in mid-March, it banned non-essential travel, including the movement of millions of Filipinos who have not returned to their provinces.
On May 13, some two months since the quarantine was declared to stem the spread of COVID-19, the government released guidelines on how stranded Filipinos can return home.
The guidelines are under Memorandum No. 2020-02 of the National Task Force Against COVID-19, which was signed by its chief, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana.
“The order intends to provide guidelines following a systemic and coordinated approach in facilitating and transporting locally stranded individuals (LSIs) to their respective residences,” the memorandum reads.
But with the infectious COVID-19 still spreading in the country, how will the government ensure that the homebound trips would not lead to mass infections?
We break down the 6-page memorandum below.
The memorandum is intended for locally stranded individuals, who are defined as “foreign nationals or Filipino citizens in a specific locality within the Philippines who have expressed intention to return to their place of residence/home origin.”
They include the following:
The memorandum is also for Returning Overseas Filipinos (ROFs), as defined by a corresponding memorandum by the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) issued on May 21:
They must have undergone 14-day quarantine before heading home, and that they are not contact, suspect, probable, or confirmed COVID-19 cases.
If the LSI has recovered from COVID-19, they must have gotten two negative results through RT-PCR tests.
The memorandum creates the Sub-Task Group on Management of Returning Overseas Filipinos and Locally Stranded Individuals (STG of ROFs and LSIs).
The task group is then further divided into two:
All regional task forces are ordered to organize their own sub-clusters to handle returning overseas Filipinos and stranded individuals to coordinate with the national task units.
The local government units will then coordinate with their regional task forces. They cannot deny the entry of LSIs with complete requirements.
The national departments, meanwhile, have the following responsibilities:
The agencies above will work in 3 phases to send people back to their homes.
The memorandum mandates that physical distancing rules be followed for the entirety of the LSI’s journey.
These guidelines would still need to be matched with the internal memoranda of agencies involved in the process.
These guidelines would still need to be matched with the internal memoranda of agencies involved in the process.
Local governments also need to do the same, leading to some localities already looking for LSIs who wish to come home, while others are still telling their residents to wait.
Read the relevant documents below:
– Rappler.com
Rambo Talabong covers the House of Representatives and local governments for Rappler. Prior to this, he covered security and crime. He was named Jaime V. Ongpin Fellow in 2019 for his reporting on President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. In 2021, he was selected as a journalism fellow by the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics.