The fault is ultimately with the President

By Antonio Contreras, 6 Aug 2020

THE urge to write something positive and inspiring about President Rodrigo Duterte is strong, after weeks of being so overly critical of him. But it is difficult, particularly when one is confronted with the series of missteps that he, his officials and his government have made recently.

It is also uncomfortable to venture into the blame game. Unfortunately, rooting out the problem becomes imperative particularly if the guilty does not even reflect on the mistakes, apologize for these and try harder to do better. Thus, it becomes necessary to point our fingers in the direction of the President, if only to remind him that he, in the end, will have to bear the burden of responsibility for the mess that we are in now as we engage in a battle with the coronavirus disease 2019 or Covid-19.

After all, any plea made against finger-pointing can only be warranted when matched by admission of guilt and acts of contrition, things that the President appears not to be keen on doing. For starters, he could very well do this by firing Health Secretary Francisco Duque 3rd, who apparently does not have the courage to resign. In more mature democracies, it is no longer an issue of actual guilt that one willingly steps down from public office but a matter of keeping honor, saving face and sparing the office from further erosion. But instead of letting Duque go, the President even defended him and rationalized his continued stay by saying that the present state of disarray in our public health system is not his fault, as he did not import the virus.

Indeed, Duque did not. Because the one who, and by his sheer acts of omission, opened the floodgates for the entry of the virus was the President himself. Duque was only acting as his loyal alter ego who dutifully implemented his wishes.

Things would have been drastically different had the President acted with extreme dispatch in addressing the Covid-19 pandemic the first time we had our first case at the end of January. But instead of taking the threat seriously, by imposing strict border controls immediately, he was more concerned about not hurting the feelings of China.

Our country lost so much time in preparing for the worst; this was largely due to the nonchalant attitude of the President who once pooh-poohed the virus. Thus, instead of augmenting and fortifying our public health system, building new emergency facilities, hiring new medical personnel and procuring the necessary equipment, the President opted to wage a word war with the United States for its cancellation of Sen. Ronald dela Rosa’s visa. Instead of enhancing and upgrading our testing, contact tracing, isolation and treatment capacities, he spent more time quarreling with ABS-CBN Corp. and with Maria Ressa. And instead of assembling the best and brightest minds in the medical sciences of public health and epidemiology to run his anti-Covid-19 response, he placed it at the helm of retired military generals, thereby rendering our war with the virus as perhaps one of the most militarized in the world.

There would not have been a problem in bringing in the military, but this would have resonated more had this been in the form of mobilizing the military’s medical brigades, as well as reservists in rendering support activities, particularly in attending to the milder cases. This would have helped in lessening the pressure on the medical frontliners and hospitals as they would have just dealt with the more severe and critical cases, which by experts’ estimate is only around 20 percent of the confirmed cases.

Instead of investing in a more systematic and rigorous targeted testing and contact tracing, as well as in implementing more targeted lockdowns, we ended up opting for a blanket, simplistic lockdown of huge swaths of the country regardless of the dynamics of the infection, and its possible impact on economic activity. We now have one of the longest lockdowns in the entire world, and our only contribution is in the evolution of a typology of ECQ, MECQ, GCQ and MGCQ, while we have nothing dramatically successful to offer.

We could have institutionalized contact tracing and enforcement of public health measures not only in local communities but also in workplaces. The private sector should have been mobilized to take care of their own employees, their families and their immediate communities. We could have transformed the entire public health system into a private-public partnership by making business invest in the effort to make their workers, their communities and their markets safe and resilient. We could have provided incentives to companies to engage in these innovative models, and even used this as a prerequisite for them to be given permission to operate.

We could have created economic bubbles that would serve as safe havens and sanctuaries for economic activity. We could have secured these areas as the core from where supply chains for goods and services emanate and radiate. We could have translated lockdowns to becoming tools to enable production and economic activities, instead of undermining these.

There are many lost opportunities, which until now the President appears not to own up to and take responsibility for. Worse, he continues with his nonchalant attitude, and his inability to fully grasp the magnitude of the disaster that is already with us.

He keeps on justifying his actions by arguing that no one was prepared for this, thereby giving the impression that all countries were caught off-guard. This is simply factually incorrect. Many countries, including many in Southeast Asia, came prepared. And now they are rewarded with lower cases and fatalities, something that Interior Secretary Año even disparaged and doubted as probably a lie.

Meanwhile, we can only gnash our teeth as Sen. Cynthia Villar scolds medical frontliners who are now overwhelmed to have more passion while our President seriously advises us to use gasoline as a disinfectant.