THE WRONG TARGETS, THE WRONG REASONS
Until this morning, Malacanang and its allies in the legislature were pushing to grant Rodrigo Duterte emergency powers that threatened privately owned hospitals, medical facilities, and hotels with government takeover. The draft measure also transforms a huge chunk of the national budget projects into a giant kitty for Duterte.
A great public outcry that crested during this morning’s special session forced the government to step back. Instead, it proposed to mandate the use of these facilities to house health workers and people under quarantine, and to aid the distribution of medical and social relief goods.
The original proposal was an obscenity. Even with that small win for the people, many dangerous elements remain.
This original provision would have trapped sectors, also exerting heroic efforts so stem the spread of the novel coronavirus, in the death grip of a government that has to be prodded every painful step to do the right thing.
Hotels are already being transformed into quarantine facilities. Some have offered their facilities for free. Innovative mayors did not need the President’s hammer to do that. They only needed common sense and humility to have the private sector respond to their calls for help.
Emergency powers that drastically curtail oversight and accountability systems is a lazy way out and a prescription for sweetheart deals with government cronies.
Private hospitals are only temporarily scaling down operations to quarantine their staff following deaths and infections caused by exposure to novel coronavirus patients. At least three doctors have succumbed to the contagion. Many other doctors and allied health professionals are sick.
Why should the government be trusted with management of these facilities when its gross neglect of the needs of frontline health workers and the communities they serve is the cause of these terrible attrition rates?
When state hospital staff are literally begging for personal protective equipment more than a month since the first novel coronavirus cases cropped up, why should we believe a government takeover of private hospitals will solve the problem?
Kristine Sabillo reports that the head of the Lung Center of the Philippines’ administrative services says they only have 98 suits left.
“We are seeing at the end of the day we will have nothing,” she quotes Dr Antonio Ramos as saying on behalf of health workers currently handling 40 patients and needing from 80–100 protective and isolation suits daily. This is one of the hospitals chosen to provide dedicated services for COVID19 cases.
We have a hard time buying now, health officials said, because of the tight global demand. We have to rely on donations.
Part of governance is foreseeing problems and with COVID19, there was a huge map to track. Duterte was too preoccupied with sparing China any embarrassment; every delay — from testing to protection mechanisms — flowed from that decision.
This government wants total trust and obedience; this same government that coddled politicians and important personages, placing even the hale and asymptomatic among them at the head of the line for tests, while many suspected COVID19 patients die without their test results coming out or, worse, die without test kits reaching their hospitals.
This same government that demands emergency powers was still sitting on PPE donations as health professionals were going under days into the lockdown.
It took a huge furor to get the Bureau of Customs to clear critical needs. Its slowness on acting on COVID19 life-and-death concerns is a contrast to the speed with which it waved through drug shipments valued collectively at over P10 billion.
Anguish on the frontlines
Across the country, young medical professionals are breaking their silence to hold government accountable.
My daughter is one of them. A senior resident in a major state hospital, she posted her second public message in a week:
We are crying for help — the people you promised to serve. We work our assess off — Sa LOOB at LABAS. Because we are afraid, too. We are afraid for ourselves. And we are most afraid, for the people we promised to serve every single day.
We are just doctors and nurses (housekeeping, guards, and all the health workers manning the hospitals) who will do our duty for the casualties of this war.
But because you DO NOT HEED our calls for help, and our calls fall on DEAF ears. Because of your INACTION, and because of your SELF-SERVING and INEFFICIENT PLANS — we, THE PEOPLE, will all be PAWNS of your BAD GOVERNANCE.
DO NOT ADD MORE CASUALTIES. DO NOT WAIT FOR US TO BE DEPLETED. DO NOT WAIT or people, INCLUDING YOU, WILL HAVE NO ONE TO TURN TO. So DO YOUR JOB OUTSIDE.
Yes. My frustration, my anger is DIRECTED AT YOU. Not at the victims, not the people on the streets who are out because of necessity. BUT, YOU.
The death in testing among PUIs and PUMs increase exponentially the risk of community transmission. When people with symptoms are not tested, their immediate family, their neighbors, their contacts could very well be walking around innocently infecting others.
My daughter and other young doctors work 24-hour and 10-hour shifts. Where before they would sleep off their exhaustion, these days they proceed to their initiatives to get people off the streets by providing them alternative sources of food.
It shouldn’t be their job but they do it because, as she puts it, “if they die, we could die, too.”
Neglect of the poor isn’t just an abstract argument for them, who minister daily to the working poor and jobless indigents. It is real. It is personal. As my daughter has shared many times, it has become routine for doctors to dip into personal funds to help patients purchase medicines when there are no government stocks available.
Huge kitty
As to the question of emergency funds, the government demands carte blanche after presenting a P27-billion mitigation budget weighed down by tourism projects already in the pipeline when COVID19 was a long way off.
Now Congress is telling Duterte needs the freedom to play with P175 billion in off-budget items, on top of what he wants to chop off from programmed funds.
There is no question that 18 million poor Filipinos nationwide, given the fast expansion of lockdown areas, will need succor.
But does the President really care about them?
Duterte and his economic advisers balked at the use of public monies to ensure safety nets for one-third of Metro Manila’s population that faced hunger due to the lockdown. Never forget that.
The budget secretary dismissed calls for a supplemental budget to plug the welfare holes. There’s enough money, he insisted.
Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez told the informal sector to hightail it for the provinces, where combined hospital beds only comprise a third of the national inventory, channeling Imelda Marcos’ strategy of shoving the poor out of sight and out of mind.
“Sumunod lang kayo,” the President and his chief law enforcers warned.
“Nobody dies from hunger,” Salvador Panelo quipped.
Never ever forget that.
Duterte has shielded many of his men in the face of corruption and drug scandals. He has a track record for going after the economic interests of perceived enemies and then delivering the same to friends. He has also reneged on pledges to ease the economic and social burdens of the working poor.
The services of government are dangled in a never-ending game of reward and punishment. Think of Marawi.
Emergency powers will only reward those close to the powers that be. The rest, including local governments down the line, will have to surrender and worship at the foot of Duterte and his minions if they want crumbs from that pie.
Contempt for law
The government will comply with laws even with these extraordinary powers, say Duterte’s allies.
This regime has spent the last three and a half years kicking the law and the rights of citizens.
Its implementation of the lockdown is characterized by lumpen jeers and whims. Duterte’s signals raised security forces to a preeminent position, forcing civilian agencies to chase after every overreach.
Imaginary restrictions have led to arrests.
Attacks against critics continue, taking advantage of the rights responders’ lack of mobility.
JUST OBEY.
Never mind that officials contradict themselves many times within a day. Never mind that they cite non-existent rules.
We are told to obey, or else.
Because human rights are canceled in the face of an emergency, said a presidential assistant. Because an emergency abolishes the writ of habeas corpus.
Those who question incoherent, incomprehensible, insensitive policies are troublemakers, enemies of the state even without the grant of emergency powers.
A corrupt, abusive government can only worsen the impact s of COVID19 on this country.
An emergency measure that offers many holes to expand displays of power, and provisions for extensions as Duterte sees fit, may also kill our fragile, embattled institutions of democracy.
