Editorial
“We are waging a losing battle against COVID-19.”
That was how medical frontliners summarized the dire state of the country, which is now Southeast Asia’s pandemic hotspot. The open letter to the president supported by more than 80 medical societies calling for a “time out” opened with distressing news: “our healthcare system has been overwhelmed.”
Hospitals in the metro are “overwhelmed” and “many [hospital personnel] have resigned” out of “fear, fatigue, and poor working conditions.” Our “contact tracing is failing miserably” and local government units’ insistence on rapid tests “may be responsible for the surge of cases” since these tests miss more than half of infected cases.
The country’s health workers have been overworked and over-exhausted due to the repeated failings of the administration. If a better response had been facilitated early on, then the situation wouldn’t have been as bad as it is right now and the burden carried by our frontliners wouldn’t have had to be so great to the point that they need to ask for a “time out.”
The situation will only continue to worsen if a major restructuring and fortification of our public health system, as it stands, will not be undergone.
Even before the pandemic shook the country to its core, the health sector, in general, as well as workers under it, has always been undervalued and mistreated.
Budget proposals for public health, health systems strengthening, and epidemiology and surveillance are significantly lower than those for national defense and anti-communist forces. Health workers are severely overworked, sometimes enduring 16 hours of duty a day due to understaffing and underfunding of hospitals, for low pay.
The onslaught of COVID-19 exposed even further how broken the health system is and how little the government cared for it. Frontliners continue to sacrifice time with their loved ones to serve, risking themselves in unsafe working conditions and shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE). These factors have led to the 1,694 cases of coronavirus among health workers as of May 2020.
Our health frontliners still working overtime despite their dangerous infection rate is sadly in vain because of the slow and inefficient approach the administration is taking, as an effect of their focus on using the crisis as a window for inciting oppression.
Instead of putting medical experts in charge of the pandemic response, implementing mass testing, enforcing well-coordinated stringent testing and contact tracing, and hiring more medical personnel, their efforts are spent on repressive acts such as the railroading of the Anti-Terror Law and the shutdown of the largest local broadcasting network, ABS-CBN.
Until the government puts an end to its militaristic approaches, cases will rapidly increase and health workers will keep slaving away as the situation worsens. Thousands more will get infected unless the calls of treating the pandemic as a public health crisis are heard. Changes should start now if we are to have any hope of “healing as one.”
Update (August 10, 10:29 p.m.): The first paragraph was edited to clarify that the Philippines is Southeast Asia’s pandemic hotspot.
