A Filipino idiomatic expression posits: “Ang ‘di lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makararating sa patutunguhan.” Those who don’t look back on where they came from won’t get to where they’re going.”

With this nugget of Filipino wisdom, I argue that after a year of the government clearly failing in our battle against COVID, it is time we make this government more accountable for its dismal leadership in the health sector.

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It is time to really point fingers now, I say. Mind you, this is not about playing the blame game. This is about making public officials and supposed leaders accountable for their apparent and almost criminal incompetence.  I say “almost criminal” with now over 10,000 casualties in our country, scores of them being health workers and otherwise young and vigorous members of the national workforce.

From 2020, what we have witnessed has been a quite militaristic approach to addressing the COVID threat. Recall how a retired soldier from last year,  who was suffering from mental health problems, was gunned down in broad daylight by police personnel for supposedly violating quarantine protocols, and that very recent case of a young worker in Cavite, who died of a massive heart attack after being sanctioned in a police precinct to do extreme exercises for violating curfew under the so-called “NCR Plus” bubble ECQ. 

Note as well how certain government officials have openly blamed the general public’s alleged lack of discipline and supposed breaching of quarantine protocols for the continued spread of the virus, and even the noted surges in the number of COVID cases in our comunities. In fact, the COVID crisis has been packaged by even the presidential spokesperson himself as a problem of Filipinos’ supposed lack of discipline, calling us all pasaway despite the fact that the crisis is clearly a health system and epidemiological crisis fundamentally, with broad and dire economic repercussions.

To more clearly lay down our critique of the government’s approach, let us clarify what should and could have been done. Look at the experience of other countries like Indonesia, for instance, which has been comparatively more successful in managing the spread of COVID in its archipelago.

On top of an initial response of constricting entry to its borders, the key elements or strategies in their campaign were:

First, the employment of data-driven targeted lockdowns down to the household level. In other words, they had granular lockdowns and not wide-area lockdowns or quarantines, like what what we are continuing to employ with the so-called “NCR Plus” bubble.

Such a granular approach could only be made possible with the second strategy: a no-nonsense national mass testing and contact tracing scheme to identify those who need to be treated or put in quarantine, and which households or clusters of household communities should really be under lockdown to avoid a wide-area economic paralysis.

Third, the provision of access to healthcare services to attend especially to those who are severely infected.

Fourth, the provision of adequate and timely social welfare support for those who are economically unsettled by the lockdowns, so that they can withstand the very real daily pressure of immobility.

Much later, with vaccines already available in the global market, they were able to make advanced or early procurements for their peoples and roll out an efficient – and again, data-driven – vaccination program. 

So now, with these programmatic ideals laid down, I think we all could very well make our own personal and more objective assessment of how the COVID-19 crisis was handled by the national government.

But one thing may need to be underscored from the onset: we put the wrong foot forward in our march to battle against COVID, with the President himself going to the extent of downplaying the threat of the virus, and laying the predicate that there is much in the Filipino public that may be blamed for our wrong stance against COVID.

He also went as far as to say in one of his weekly diatribes in 2020 that “China has been kind to us, we can only also show the same favor to them,” in a tone that brooked no opposition. He also told the public to “Stop this xenophobia thing,” in a news conference after a meeting with agencies on the coronavirus, back when the virus had claimed its first fatality in the country.

But then again, in what I would call a misplaced sense of national pride, he seemingly rallied us all by saying, “Kaya natin ito, itong COVID-19. Maliit na bagay lang ito. Madami [na] tayong nadaanan. Huwag kayong matakot, hindi ko kayo iiwanan.”

On February 13, 2020, the president also said in a video meessage: “I call on our people to remain calm, vigilant, responsible, and I also ask your trust and cooperation, support as we face the challenge.” 

I’d also like to say that we have been most cooperative as a people, even to the point of being oppressed unduly.

Take the case, for instance, of the IATF order requiring the public to use face shields aside from face masks when going outside our homes, when said practice is not even among the WHO-recommended means to help control the virus. The WHO only has the use of face masks among its list of to-do’s or protocols. We wore and are continuing to wear that cumbersome gadget with no scientific study to back up the policy for its use.

Indonesia

Let me dare to be crude, and disrespectful even, by saying that that it is tragic how Indonesia is led by a Jokowi, while we are stuck with a Joke Only.

Now, as this piece is being written with the clarity of hindsight, the failure of our leadership to control the spread of COVID while putting the whole country deeper in national debt has just been punctuated by reports that 45 members of the Presidential Security Group, and even the President’s spokesperson, have been infected by the “veerus.”

In closing, let me say that I still very clearly recall now that in a televised press briefing last year, the President even joked about the virus by pretending to cough into the microphone he was using, and that the officials around him laughed with him. I found that to be a very bad joke then, knowing what a pandemic could do to the whole world.

Well, I don’t think I hear anyone laughing now, especially in the face of these rather recent, and what for some may be karmic, developments.

Lumingon po tayo sa ating pinanggalingan o pinagdaanan nitong nakaraang taon lamang. – Rappler.com

Louie C. Montemar is an Associate Professor at the PUP Department of Sociology.