By Samuel P. Medenilla & Jovee Marie N. dela Cruz
DESPITE the recent reported peace and order issues in the government’s nationwide campaign against the novel coronavirus disease (Covid-19), the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) sees no need for the country to be placed under martial law.
However, leading lawmakers are urging the Executive to extend by a fortnight the monthlong enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) that ends April 13, saying a second, worse wave of virus infections would damage the economy even more than the initial lockdown.
As far as the IATF is concerned, Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles said martial law is still not an option to maintain public order during the Covid-19 outbreak.
“That is still not being talked about [by the IATF] for now,” Nograles said during an online press briefing on Thursday, a day after police battled with and arrested protesters from an urban poor enclave in Quezon City who had poured out onto the streets to remind the government to feed them as promised during the lockdown.
Meanwhile, the chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means on Thursday called on the national government to extend for another two weeks the ECQ over Luzon, saying “the damage to the economy will be much bigger if we have to start all over again.”
House Committee on Ways and Means Chairman Joey Sarte Salceda said historical, scientific, and economic evidence points to a more cautious approach to the pandemic is “evidence-based, logical, lifesaving.”
He said his team’s modeling shows
two critical factors in fighting the disease—mobility and
“isolation tendency.”
“We are monitoring two factors. The ECQ has significantly reduced mobility. You can see that in reduced energy consumption and in reduced demand for fuel. So, people are no longer moving around carrying the virus as much as they would have,” he said.
Mass testing
“The second critical factor is what we call isolation tendency. It’s how much you isolate confirmed and suspected cases from the rest of the population. And that only increases once you know who are Covid-positive in the first place, through mass testing,” Salceda added.
Also, the lawmaker said most reputable sources in the medical community have never suggested “to shorten the lockdown,” but have done quite the opposite, proposing at least six-week lockdowns to avoid prematurely lifting restrictions and triggering a massive wave of new infections.
In his letter to President Duterte, Salceda, later followed by Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez in a separate statement to the media days later, strongly recommended mass testing to “confront the enemy.”
“We have not yet confronted the enemy or have fully grasped its dimensions. We do not yet fully know the size of its territory or the magnitude of its full impact. We must increase our testing by at least 10,000 specimens per day, contact trace and isolate with the best logical and technological means available [mobile tracking, GPS, mapping, etc.],” he said.
Salceda added that the government must also identify infection clusters with data from mass testing and intensified contact tracing, and confront the virus where it is.
“Simply said, we can only make a risk-stratified stabilization or normalization if we do mass testing of at least 200,000. Based on our capacity and possible increments, we cannot do that before April 14, thus we cannot lift ECQ and we will need the next 14 days to have a better grasp of situation,” he added.
On Wednesday, President Duterte ordered the Philippine National Police (PNP) and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to use force against those who will take advantage of the health crisis to cause public disorder as well as those who will attack health-care workers.
He made the pronouncement in response to a group of Quezon City residents, who protested earlier that day after they allegedly did not receive food packs from the government.
Legitimate concerns
Some of the protesters were arrested, thus prompting labor coalition Nagkaisa and militant labor group Kilusang Mayo Uno to express their alarm on the incident.
Rather than silencing critics, Nagkaisa said government should “welcome criticisms to immediately know its lapses and weakness so remedial measures can be adopted. As such, government should stop wasting time and energy, not to mention political capital, in shutting down its critics.”
For its part, KMU said the protest would have never happened if the government was already effectively able to provide for the needs of the people during the enhanced community quarantine in Luzon.
Image credits: AP/Aaron Favila