With President Duterte down to his last months in office, community health advocates say health spending is an election issue that must be addressed – a first step in undoing the sorry state of the country’s public health care under an administration that won with a promise of tapang at malasakit.
A World Bank study found that children’s feces are potentially riskier than adult feces due to higher prevalence of diarrhea and pathogens.
Restricting mobility is meant to give government the time to build its capacities to stop the spread of the virus. But what happens when a government only resorts to a lockdown and nothing else?
Health experts and lawmakers are alarmed over the Philippine government’s deafening silence on moves of several countries to press for the waiver of TRIPS on medicines, particularly on COVID-19 vaccines.
It has been two months since the Philippine government began its vaccine rollout but the country is far from inoculating at least one percent of the population as public hesitancy on vaccine efficacy and safety remains.
“This is a matter of survival to us, because we need to bring back good governance,” said retired Associate Justice Antonio Carpio.
“We hope that Secretary Duque understands that every minute in our lives as health workers matters. Many from our ranks got sick and succumbed to COVID-19 already. We can no longer afford to spend more time to wait in order to get our rightful benefits and demands.”
The national government has also allowed private enterprises and local government units (LGUs) to procure vaccines for their constituents and employees provided that they sign a tripartite agreement with the national government and vaccine manufacturers. The tripartite agreement is meant to ensure vaccine manufacturers that the national government would cover indemnification and the cost of adverse effects.
At first glance, it seems reassuring that the Philippines’ cumulative 884,783 COVID-19 cases as of April 13 is just around half of Indonesia’s 1.58 million infections. However, the Philippines’ 165,534 active cases is the highest in the region and more than Indonesia’s 108,599 active cases – even if Indonesia’s population is over two-and-a-half times bigger.
AHW said understaffing schemes by hospitals force health workers to be on duty for at least 12 hours or even 24 hours while some hospitals only have skeletal forces.
Halfway into the week-long stricter lockdown in the capital, health workers are still in agony over their unmet demands, with the government failing to address their call to look into their health, economic, and social well-being as they combat the pandemic on the ground.