AS OF SUNDAY, July 26, 2020, the Philippines’ COVID-19 cases had reached more than 80,000. That was the fourth straight day that the country reported 2,000 cases or more per day, threatening to surpass mainland China’s number of cases since the beginning of the pandemic.
This last weekend also marked 22 cases at the House of Representatives, with three more people testing positive for the disease: a congressman, a consultant, and a staff writer. That is a substantial proportion of cases in a single institution – the venue of the President’s annual SONA, no less.
This last Saturday, frontliners at the National Kidney and Transplant Institute (NKTI) staged a silent protest over what they bewail as worsening health and working conditions at the premiere government health institution.
A couple of days before the President’s SONA, NKTI employees protested the rapid increase in the number of health workers infected with COVID-19. Some 174 of them have been reported positive for the virus, 65 have resigned and almost a dozen workers have availed themselves of retirement benefits.
According to the Alliance of Health Workers at the NKTI, health workers are being charged for their own swab tests creditable to their PhilHealth. They are not being tested for free, notwithstanding the high-risk nature of their employment and the level of their sacrifice. They have since appealed to the management to release their performance-based bonus that have remained pending for the past two years.
Yesterday, right before the scheduled SONA, health workers at the Lung Center of the Philippines staged their own protest decrying similar deplorable conditions in the workplace. There is continued understaffing because of government’s failure to regularize contractual health workers.
There is not enough protective equipment for these workers and yet mandatory swab testing is not being administered on them free of charge. As of this writing the Lung Center was reported to have breached capacity to take in more COVID patients.
All these against the backdrop of yet another corruption scandal at the PhilHealth insurance corporation, a government-controlled corporation chaired by the Secretary of Health. In a resolution filed yesterday, Sen. Panfilo Lacson sought a Senate investigation into the “rampant corruption, incompetence, inefficiency” within PhilHealth amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Philippines is not expected to soon traverse the road to economic recovery without the current health crisis getting fixed under a competent and focused leadership.
Oxford Economics has published a report measuring the recovery paths of 12 economies across Asia-Pacific and the Philippines recorded the second-lowest score after India. Vietnam has the brightest recovery prospects in the region.
The report noted that “the fiscal policy response has been quite meager in both India and Philippines, especially compared to the stringency of lockdowns they had imposed — which at one point were not only among the most severe in Asia but also globally.”
Despite this, Sen. Christopher Lawrence “Bong” Go, chairman of the Senate health and demography committee, says that Health secretary Francisco Duque III continues to enjoy the President’s trust and confidence.
Despite calls for Duque’s resignation made by several groups including his colleagues in the Senate, Go sides with President Duterte by repeating his statement that it is difficult to “change horses at midstream” amid the national health emergency.
It will be a mistake to think that maintaining a bumbling Secretary of Health in his stable will somehow cushion the President against scathing criticism on how this government is handling the pandemic.
Article VII, Section 17 of the Constitution explicitly states: “The President shall have control of all the executive departments, bureaus and offices. He shall ensure that the laws be faithfully executed.”
Under the doctrine of qualified political agency, each head of a department is, and must be, the President’s alter ego in the matters of that department where the President is required by law to exercise authority. Since the President is the head of the executive branch, the Supreme Court has ruled that “he controls and directs his acts; he appoints him and can remove him at pleasure; he is the executive, not any of his secretaries.”
Ultimately, the speed of economic recovery will be at the compass of the Chief Executive./PN
