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Moves to boost the nation’s health defenses during the “timeout” are needed not only to stop the pandemic from reaching its tipping point, “but also to get the country ready for another calamity – typhoons.” “Kung ang COVID-19 ay isang unos, may mga bagyo pang parating,” Senate...

It is a doctor’s prescription with side effects. But if it will cure the patient and prevent medical personnel from falling ill, then there’s no choice but to follow it.  It will be the government’s job to manage the side effects – specifically the tremendous whiplash...

I will not rush to conclude that these are doctored data. What I would ask of them is a better explanation of the methodology used. And a breakdown, per town, so it will give us a high-resolution picture. Let academics vet and validate it for our enlightenment, to confirm if the...

How can government reward medical frontliners? Let us count some of the ways. Release of hazard pay, now na. Regularization. Promotion. As to promotion, kung di pa kaya ng mass testing sa tao, mass promotion muna sa mga nagta-trabaho. There are two kinds of job promotion. One is...

Let us also swab-test the other, more important VIPs – the Very Important Pasaheros.  I am referring to LSIs who have been packed for days in quarters so crammed that physical distancing was impossible, even for those adamant in observing it. If we have tested for free...

I think the President economized in spelling out his anti-pandemic program, which is what Filipinos were expecting to hear more from him.  He could have made it detailed and nuanced, in a language that is comforting, assuring and emphatic.  It scored low in the...

I think people are not looking forward to the soaring oratory, the poetry of a traditional SONA. They are not even interested in bold strokes. What they want to hear is the to-do list in a wartime SONA that will spell out the battle plan against the pandemic. Specifically, they...

There is a group of forgotten and neglected health frontliners to whom the nation owes so much—the social workers in public clinics and hospitals. The best belated thank you card that we can give them is to make their minimum pay equal to nurses, P32,035 a month, that of Salary...