So I blogged about my outstanding stats last night and I still think that my blog posts on Mama Mary garnered the highest stats throughout the years I’ve been blogging. Hooray!
Got this early morning rants that I can’t simply ignore. I really don’t know what really is the government’s priority, it seems that they are not so focused in this pandemic. Even DOH’s daily reports seems to be lacking in substance. We have reached almost 250,000 positive cases and it still keeps on rising every day. A few days ago, they discovered bigtime anomalies at our Philhealth system. The officials appointed by the present administration squandered 15B worth of funds and the president just let the head of it resign because of ill-health? Amazing…in a bad way. Those funds are contributions from the working force of this nation. One is allowed voluntary monthly contributions when you retire early until you reach the age 60. Once you become a senior, you are not required to pay anymore. They say that by next year, there will be no more funds for the people to use in case they are hospitalized. Philhealth deduction is the only way that could help a patient pay her/his hospital bills. It’s our health insurance. I wonder if we will still be able to avail of it in the next few years.
Then here comes DENR (Dept. of Environment and Natural Resources) who thought of dumping dolomite sands at Manila Bay because they want to have a white beach like what we have in Boracay. But this dolomite according to study is detrimental to our health. I wonder, once it rains hard, this might be washed away and garbage from other nearby towns would appear again at the shores of Manila Bay. Is this a priority? Duterte keeps saying that there is no more budget to sustain the treatment and prevention of COVID 19 and yet they have a budget for this synthetic sand to the tune of 389M when the baywalk is only 500 meters in length. Environmentalists are definitely opposed to this project. Some estimated that 50M is enough, where will the remaining amount go? In their pockets? I say it is a misplaced priority.
On 30 January 2020, the Philippine Department of Health reported the first case of COVID-19 in the country with a 38-year-old female chinese national. On 7 March, the first local transmission of COVID-19 was confirmed. But they ignored it. They continued the flight of chinese nationals into the country until they found out that some chinese living here have their own hospitals where they treat chinese COVID patients. I don’t know what happened, because they were not reported again. Duque, the secretary of the Department of Health was then even proud to say that the control is manageable until it reached what we have now. No aggressive contact tracing was done until late. Our senators are urging Duque to resign but Duterte keeps defending him. He is so useless in DOH.
We’ve been having this CQs (ECQ, MECQ, GCQ, MGCQ) which means community quarantine since March until now. They can declare all those CQs in our midst but our economy is suffering. Many have lost their jobs and some have resorted to online selling to augment their budgets for the family. Come to think of it, this government even thought of having these small-scale/household business registered and be taxed. Why can’t they force those POGOs (Philippine Online Gaming Operators) from china to properly pay their taxes which are in arrears for so long now. Someone up there is beholden to china.
And the head of the nation hasn’t shown his face for I think more than a month now. He does not even stay in Malacanang.
Disturbing news Arlene… I hope you are keeping well and staying safe…
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Thank you Ivor. We are doing fine. I hope you are too.
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In one of the states the governor forbids the publishing of cases in schools so parents have no way of knowing if they are safe to send their kids. Playing with the numbers seems our government’s only way to make it look less serious.
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Students here are not yet allowed to go out. Classes in public schools will open by Oct. 5. Nate has his starting last August 22, I think. He is enjoying his online classes.
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