WHO: Philippines Covid-19 Response Saved 1.8 Million Pinoys from Poverty! What about the remaining 100+ Million Whose Lives and Futures Were Ruined by Lockdowns, Who Are Still Struggling to Recover?

Rewriting history with cherry picked telescoped data! Financial woes. Mandatory defibrillators. President planning new health facilities, but where are the staff? Can new professionals be trained?

What a headline! I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry upon reading this! What a parody of the reality that all in the Philippines have lived through.

All those who lived through the last 3+ years of pandemic measures in the Philippines, experienced severely curtailed, truncated, disrupted life under severe lockdowns which decimated businesses and savings. Many small businesses and tourist related industries were shut for more than 2 years, some never to reopen. Reserves built over many years were spent trying to keep as many employees employed as possible, even in the face of massively lost business. Education related and entertainment services largely shut. So many lost their jobs! Many have not yet returned to work!

Aid? A few packets of instant noodles, a few cans of sardines, a few kg of rice (sometimes reported to have been inedible), a few thousand pesos distributed a few times, often shared / partially withheld by distributing officials compensated for lives destroyed, prevented poverty!

There were many problems with distribution of aid, many missed out, and of course efforts were often politicized. The following historical article describes some of the issues.

Burgeoning National Debt

Of course, aid had to come from somewhere and it was at the expense of massively burgeoning national debt, which Government Financial Secretary is currently trying to downplay.

Mandatory Defibrillation Devices

Copying the worldwide trending, the Philippines Heart Association is calling for the mandatory installation of defibrillation devices in all establishments. Philippines is going the way of other nations with rapidly escalating cardiac events necessitating heart restart devices to be installed in all public and private establishments.

New Healthcare Facilities Promised, But Who Will Staff Them?

Speaking of healthcare, the President is promising to bring quality healthcare to all Filipinos, deliverance of one of his election promises.

A very noble and necessary goal, indeed! These health care centers will need to be built and staffed. There is already a mass shortage of health care workers in the Philippines. In 2021, DOLE identified a shortfall of 92,000 physicians and 44,000 nurses! Thus, the training and mentoring of HCW is going to necessarily be part of the plan!

Ratio of HCW to population in Philippines is far from ideal. The situation may be even worse now that many health care workers are being lost to heart attacks, cancer, and other fatal health outcomes, or are unable to work due to disability.

Lost Education and Poverty Impacts - Will There Be Students Qualified to Enter Higher Education?

This very comprehensive paper on educational losses and its implications makes for very sobering reading.

3 years of lockdowns make for dire consequences, which is summarized very well in the Introduction. Not only has poverty increased, the pool of graduates qualified and capable of training for higher professions will have been much reduced due to education losses. This has direct consequences for the labor market, as well as for Government revenues, economic growth, and society as a whole.

The paper raises the need for remedial measures to counter educational losses. However, countering such losses would require skilled teachers, resources, and facilities; sparse even in well-to-do areas, and missing in poorer ones!

Philippines also has mass shortages of teachers, and DepEd struggles to fill teaching positions!

147,000 teacher positions need to be filled in public schools to address education learning crisis.

It probably doesn’t help that professionals from all walks of life were forced to accept vaccination, and boosters. The health outcomes of these products are accelerating now. Labor shortages are likely to get far worse with rapidly rising deaths and disability! Watch Edward Dowd, here (click this link, I can’t embed), discussing the data that cannot be hidden. Sobering!