covid 19 experience essay philippines

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The Philippines’ Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Learning from Experience and Emerging Stronger to Future Shocks

Celia M. Reyes
COVID-19 pandemic
whole-of-government approach
COVID-19 policy responses
macroeconomic response
public health shock
Philippine economy
crisis response
food security
overseas Filipino workers
human development
income distribution
basic education
crisis communication
risk communication
COVID-19 recovery
local government units
fiscal response to pandemic

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic hit the Philippine economy and society unprecedentedly. To protect the people, the government had to act decisively and identify solutions to contain the rapid spread of the virus and the devastating economic and social disruption caused by the pandemic. This book compiles papers assessing the strategies, policies, and recovery efforts that the government had implemented during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. It discusses the challenges that the country had experienced and the government's responses in the areas of health, macroeconomy, food security, labor, social protection, poverty, education, digitalization, fiscal policy, and crisis and risk communication. Learning from these experiences, this book provides recommendations to help the Philippines recover from the current crisis and build better resilience to future shocks.

This publication has been cited 4 times

Alviar, DC. 2023. Sapat ba ang teknolohiya upang epektibong magturo? Mga aral mula sa PIDS . Tutubi News Magazine.
Daily Guardian . 2024. COVID-19 school closures led to significant learning losses – expert . DailyGuardian .
Manila Standard Business. 2023. PIDS: Technology key to learning amid crises . Manila Standard.
Nazario, Dhel. 2023. NAST PHL set to introduce new members, recognize outstanding Filipino scientists . Manila Bulletin.

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Realisations of a young woman during COVID-19

Mau, 17, from Southern Leyte in the Philippines describes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on her life.

Indescribable.

I attempted to compress into a single word this pandemic that made its way into our young lives and wreaked havoc. Through the lens of the young, I wonder how it feels to see the world somehow fall apart through our very own eyes, seeing most of humanity struggling to fight back with this unseen threat. At such a young and crucial point in our lives, we are experiencing a global crisis not just on health, but also on many aspects of our society that the extent of its damaging repercussions might be too complex and complicated for us to digest.

Now, I ask you, my fellow young people, how do you feel? Is everything alright for you?

One thing is certain. It is not an isolated case for me. Going through this crisis is indeed not easy, and has never been easy with anyone else’s, too. We are fighting our own battles right now. Being cut off to see our friends and family and the outside world may have been a struggle. Still, I know that we could get through this together.

It is for our own good and for the greater good that we stay in our homes. We could help our nation stand up and fight, for our health workers at the frontlines in this battle. They, who became our new world heroes. We also acknowledge our low-skilled workers who play a significant role in combatting the pandemic. Our janitors and street sweepers who keep our communities clean for us to be free from the risks that may endanger our health. To our barangay officials, the police, and government employees who ensure the safety and well-being of our countrymen in the communities; so that every family has food on the table and gets through each day. To the initiatives of the civil society and non-government organizations who take part in giving out basic needs to the less fortunate. The youth thank you. There are still a number who remain unmentioned. But, even from the safety of our homes, we have seen your commendable efforts to help and serve the people, who are in dire need of basic commodities due to diminishing access to resources brought by the lockdown.

Yes, I hear you, my fellow young people. We are all inspired and motivated by these heroes. Those, who with their valiant efforts, contribute and play their part for the betterment of our country. We wanted to do something, too. I feel your burning desire and passion to lend a hand. And, yes! We have so much to do even from our homes. After binge-watching all those series that you wanted to see in the past month and all the books that you may have read, reread – again and again – right now, let us finally take into account the welfare of our fellow Filipinos in light of the pandemic. No pressure needed though. It is not as if we are obliged to do so. Take all the time that you need. And when you’re ready, we go. This stems out from pure desire and genuine will to act for our rising country. Without any further ado, shall we proceed?

First and foremost, we must inculcate into our minds to stay home, unless it is truly necessary or if there are immediate needs that must be acquired outside of our homes. Consequently, let us spread this message to our peers and also those who are within the reach of our influence. In order to flatten the curve, we must participate in mitigating the increasing number of cases. Observe physical distance and, when you are sick, practice self-isolation from the others. This is already a great help to combat the pandemic. So, stay home, peers!

Since we are within the confines of our home, probably closely knit with our families, remember that there are also those who may not feel ‘at home’ during these times. If they show any indication that they are unwell at home, understand that we do not know what they are battling with.

They are probably feeling isolated, sad, and lonely, brought by the distance from friends or people they usually hang out with. Some of them, we might not know, are probably victims of domestic child abuse initiated by their own family members.

In light of this, we, in a way, can help them by sharing the hotlines and contact numbers of the concerned authorities for children’s rights. The Bantay Bata 163 hotline, Commission on Human Rights hotline, PNP Aleng Pulis hotline which is open 24/7, and many others.

All the more during the quarantine, we must protect and promote children’s rights at all times. If you see someone treated harshly by people with authority outside your home, report through other authorities. If you see similar incidents on social media, report those, too. This act, no matter how small it may seem, could save lives and protect rights.

It might not be known to some of us that there are also dangers behind the façade of the online world through our phones and computers. We must be extra careful as the threats are now heightened. There are online scammers and predators seeking to prey on the most vulnerable ones in the world of the internet – children. We must be wary of those dangers and be vigilant to anything that we click online. We must also keep an eye out for probable cases of online sexual exploitation of children and proactively report cases through lifesaving hotlines available, such as the 1343 Action Line Against Human Trafficking. Report incidents of cyberbullying to help victims and stop the recurrence of these incidents. If we turn a blind eye, it could cause seriously detrimental effects for our children and young people. Stay safe. Spread the lifesaving information and save lives.

Lastly, spread the message of hope and positivity during these trying times. It won’t hurt to be kind to people whom we digitally cross paths with. Practice the act of online empathy. We are unaware of what they are going through. Let us try to understand the situation they are in because it has never been easy for anyone.

However, this does not mean that we will tolerate harassments, threats, and discrimination online. Stand your ground. Remember that you are aware of your own rights. Continue to protect and promote equal rights for all during this quarantine. Let us devote ourselves to become a living testament to the powerful message of gender equality.

Now, as we struggle to transition from our young lives without lockdown to the ‘new normal’ with the rest of the world, my hope is that the spirit of our resilience and the camaraderie among Filipinos and the global community persist and win against all the forces that try to bring the whole world down.

Let us stay safe, well-informed and positive as we fight hand in hand. We will get through this crisis together and we will be multiple steps closer towards a new world with a healed humankind.

With a brave heart amidst the uncertainties of the future, let us hold on to each other, shall we?

Emergencies, Protection from violence, COVID-19, Gender-based violence

Girls on the frontline of flood resilience, a response to run, a home to restore: looking back at typhoon yolanda a decade later, towards self-reliance.

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Filipinos face the mental toll of the Covid-19 pandemic — a photo essay

Depression, anxiety, and other mental health-related illnesses are on the rise among millennials as they face the pressure to be functional amidst pandemic fatigue. Omengan's photo essay shows three of the many stories of mental health battles, of struggling to stay afloat despite the inaccessibility of proper mental health services, which worsened due to the series of lockdowns in the Philippines.

“I was just starting with my new job, but the pandemic triggered much anxiety causing me to abandon my apartment in Pasig and move back to our family home in Mabalacat, Pampanga.”

This was Mano Dela Cruz's quick response to the initial round of lockdowns that swept the nation in March 2020.

Anxiety crept up on Mano, who was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder Type II with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder traits. The 30-year-old writer is just one of many Filipinos experiencing the mental health fallout of the pandemic.

Covid-19 infections in the Philippines have reached 1,149,925 cases as of May 17. The pandemic is unfolding simultaneously with the growing number of Filipinos suffering from mental health issues. At least 3.6 million Filipinos suffer from mental, neurological, and substance use disorders, according to Frances Prescila Cuevas, head of the National Mental Health Program under the Department of Health.

As the situation overwhelmed him, Mano had to let go of his full-time job. “At the start of the year, I thought I had my life all together, but this pandemic caused great mental stress on me, disrupting my routine and cutting my source of income,” he said.

Mano has also found it difficult to stay on track with his medications. “I don’t have insurance, and I do not save much due to my medical expenses and psychiatric consultations. On a monthly average, my meds cost about P2,800. With my PWD (person with disability) card, I get to avail myself of the 20% discount, but it's still expensive. On top of this, I pay for psychiatric consultations costing P1,500 per session. During the pandemic, the rate increased to P2,500 per session lasting only 30 minutes due to health and safety protocols.”

The pandemic has resulted in substantial job losses as some businesses shut down, while the rest of the workforce adjusted to the new norm of working from home.

Ryan Baldonado, 30, works as an assistant human resource manager in a business process outsourcing company. The pressure from work, coupled with stress and anxiety amid the community quarantine, took a toll on his mental health.

Before the pandemic, Ryan said he usually slept for 30 hours straight, often felt under the weather, and at times subjected himself to self-harm. “Although the symptoms of depression have been manifesting in me through the years, due to financial concerns, I haven't been clinically diagnosed. I've been trying my best to be functional since I'm the eldest, and a lot is expected from me,” he said.

As extended lockdowns put further strain on his mental health, Ryan mustered the courage to try his company's online employee counseling service. “The free online therapy with a psychologist lasted for six months, and it helped me address those issues interfering with my productivity at work,” he said.

He was often told by family or friends: “Ano ka ba? Dapat mas alam mo na ‘yan. Psych graduate ka pa man din!” (As a psych graduate, you should know better!)

Ryan said such comments pressured him to act normally. But having a degree in psychology did not make one mentally bulletproof, and he was reminded of this every time he engaged in self-harming behavior and suicidal thoughts, he said.

“Having a degree in psychology doesn't save you from depression,” he said.

Depression and anxiety are on the rise among millennials as they face the pressure to perform and be functional amid pandemic fatigue.

Karla Longjas, 27, is a freelance artist who was initially diagnosed with major depression in 2017. She could go a long time without eating, but not without smoking or drinking. At times, she would cut herself as a way to release suppressed emotions. Karla's mental health condition caused her to get hospitalized twice, and she was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder in 2019.

“One of the essentials I had to secure during the onset of the lockdown was my medication, for fear of running out,” Karla shared.

With her family's support, Karla can afford mental health care.

She has been spending an average of P10,000 a month on medication and professional fees for a psychologist and a psychiatrist. “The frequency of therapy depends on one's needs, and, at times, it involves two to three sessions a month,” she added.

Amid the restrictions of the pandemic, Karla said her mental health was getting out of hand. “I feel like things are getting even crazier, and I still resort to online therapy with my psychiatrist,” she said.

“I've been under medication for almost four years now with various psychologists and psychiatrists. I'm already tired of constantly searching and learning about my condition. Knowing that this mental health illness doesn't get cured but only gets manageable is wearing me out,” she added. In the face of renewed lockdowns, rising cases of anxiety, depression, and suicide, among others, are only bound to spark increased demand for mental health services.

MANO DELA CRUZ

Writer Mano Dela Cruz, 30, is shown sharing stories of his manic episodes, describing the experience as being on ‘top of the world.’ Individuals diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder Type II suffer more often from episodes of depression than hypomania. Depressive periods, ‘the lows,’ translate to feelings of guilt, loss of pleasure, low energy, and thoughts of suicide.

Mano says the mess in his room indicates his disposition, whether he's in a manic or depressive state. “I know that I'm not stable when I look at my room and it's too cluttered. There are days when I don't have the energy to clean up and even take a bath,” he says.

Mano was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder Type II in 2016, when he was in his mid-20s. His condition comes with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder traits, requiring lifelong treatment with antipsychotics and mood stabilizers such as antidepressants.

Mano resorts to biking as a form of exercise and to release feel-good endorphins, which helps combat depression, according to his psychiatrist.

Mano waits for his psychiatric consultation at a hospital in Angeles, Pampanga.

Mano shares a laugh with his sister inside their home. “It took a while for my family to understand my mental health illness,” he says. It took the same time for him to accept his condition.

RYAN BALDONADO

Ryan Baldonado, 30, shares his mental health condition in an online interview. Ryan is in quarantine after experiencing symptoms of Covid-19.

KARLA LONGJAS

Karla Longjas, 27, does a headstand during meditative yoga inside her room, which is filled with bottles of alcohol. Apart from her medications, she practices yoga to have mental clarity, calmness, and stress relief.

Karla shares that in some days, she has hallucinations and tries to sketch them.

In April 2019, Karla was inflicting harm on herself, leading to her two-week hospitalization as advised by her psychiatrist. In the same year, she was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. The stigma around her mental illness made her feel so uncomfortable that she had to use a fake name to hide her identity.

Karla buys her prescriptive medications in a drug store. Individuals clinically diagnosed with a psychosocial disability can avail themselves of the 20% discount for persons with disabilities.

Karla Longjas is photographed at her apartment in Makati. Individuals diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) exhibit symptoms such as self-harm, unstable relationships, intense anger, and impulsive or self-destructive behavior. BPD is a dissociative disorder that is not commonly diagnosed in the Philippines.

This story is one of the twelve photo essays produced under the Capturing Human Rights fellowship program, a seminar and mentoring project

organized by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and the Photojournalists' Center of the Philippines.

Check the other photo essays here.

Larry Monserate Piojo – “Terminal: The constant agony of commuting amid the pandemic”

Orange Omengan – “Filipinos face the mental toll of the Covid-19 pandemic”

Lauren Alimondo – “In loving memory”

Gerimara Manuel – “Pinagtatagpi-tagpi: Mother, daughter struggle between making a living and modular learning”

Pau Villanueva – “Hinubog ng panata: The vanishing spiritual traditions of Aetas of Capas, Tarlac”

Bernice Beltran – “Women's 'invisible work'”

Dada Grifon – “From the cause”

Bernadette Uy – “Enduring the current”

Mark Saludes – “Mission in peril”

EC Toledo – “From sea to shelf: The story before a can is sealed”

Ria Torrente – “HIV positive mother struggles through the Covid-19 pandemic”

Sharlene Festin – “Paradise lost”

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Fighting COVID-19 in the Philippines

8 ways usaid reachhealth supports pandemic response.

As COVID-19 swept the world in 2020, the Philippines became Southeast Asia’s most affected country.

RTI International has been supporting the COVID-19 response in the Philippines through ReachHealth , a five-year United States Agency for International Development (USAID) project that strengthens and improves access to family planning and maternal and child health services.

Building on 14 years of RTI experience working with local governments in the Philippines to improve health outcomes, the USAID ReachHealth Project supports the COVID-19 response in 15 priority local government units across the country. Working closely with the Department of Health (DOH), the Department of Interior and Local Governance, UN agencies, the private sector, and civil society organizations, we strengthen the government’s emergency and ongoing response at all levels.

Our support has included operationalizing nationwide COVID-19 policies, rolling out vaccines, helping facilities access national COVID-19 financing and testing kits, strengthening the capacities of health workers on infection prevention and control and case management, improving contact tracing, and supporting risk communication and community engagement efforts. Most recently, ReachHealth has helped the country prepare for the roll out of child vaccines and the safe reopening of in-person schools.

Since ReachHealth began supporting the Philippines' pandemic response, we have trained over 20,000 people and reached nearly 37 million people with messages on preventing gender-based violence and COVID-19’s spread.

Here are eight of the important ways we have and continue to respond to COVID-19 in the Philippines:

1. Strengthening community health and support systems

Barangay Health Emergency Response Teams, or BHERTs, usually connect community members to health facilities — but during times of emergency their work becomes more important than ever. These neighborhood-based teams formed the frontline of efforts to delay COVID-19’s spread and locally contain the pandemic by communicating risk, facilitating contact tracing and vaccination, and connecting communities with broader local health systems. ReachHealth works to ensure BHERTs in hotspot communities are active, effective, and trained on critical elements of the COVID-19 community response, including essential behaviors to prevent the virus’ spread, infection prevention and control, vaccination and testing protocols, contact tracing, and quarantine and isolation. ReachHealth has helped train over 7,800 people on contact tracing and rapid response so far.

2. Increasing vaccine coverage

In 2021, ReachHealth collaborated with the DOH and local actors to plan for vaccine rollouts. We developed public messaging for local governments to spread the word, updated FAQs for community health responders like BHERTs, and supported health facility planning and preparation. Once vaccines were available, ReachHealth also helped speed up the roll out by deploying 28 mobile vaccine teams across the country to ensure even the most remote communities got access. ReachHealth has established or supported over 200 vaccination sites in the Philippines. More than 2.8 million Filipinos have been fully vaccinated with ReachHealth’s support.

A woman receives an injection at a ReachHealth event in the Philippines.

Grace Jose receives a COVID vaccine at a vaccination site in Caloocan City. Photo by Christian Rieza/USAID ReachHealth

3. Strengthening health and testing facilities

Throughout the pandemic, the science on COVID-19 and how to address it has evolved. To help health facilities keep up, ReachHealth provided training to over 5,000 people on case management and over 3,000 people on infection prevention and control. We also partnered with local governments to establish 10 additional mobile testing units and four community testing centers in vulnerable areas. As COVID-19 testing increased, so did the demand for accredited labs that could process tests quickly. By providing support , ReachHealth helped increase the number of accredited labs across the country and reduced testing times to just a few hours in eight labs in Mindanao and Luzon.

Vilma Cabral gets tested for COVID-19 at a USAID-supported community-based testing center in the Philippines. Photo by Rosana Ombao for USAID

4. Supporting a data-driven response

The DOH collaborated with the World Health Organization to launch a mobile application, COVID KAYA , that supports frontline responders with contact tracing and case monitoring. The introduction of any new, centralized data system across regions with varying needs and infrastructure can be challenging and uneven. Our team provided technical assistance to help local governments roll out the application, and directly trained officials, health workers, and personnel from health epidemiology units on its use.

5. Addressing gender-based violence

In the Philippines, 1 in 20 women and girls aged 15-49 have experienced sexual violence. COVID-19 lockdowns and quarantines brought extended periods of restricted movement and home confinement for millions of people — an unprecedented situation that worsened violence against women and children at home. ReachHealth supported the continued functioning of gender-based violence (GBV) services, such as a 24-hour helpline, while a messaging campaign, Hindi kailangang magtiis! (You don’t need to suffer in silence!), sought to prevent GBV and to let people know about available services. Since October 2020, this campaign has reached over 9 million Filipinos on Facebook alone.

6. Distributing essential equipment and supplies

Frontline health workers needed personal protective equipment (PPE) to care for their patients safely. In partnership with the Armed Forces of the Philippines, ReachHealth supported the distribution of PPE donated by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency to 109 hospitals, rural health units, and quarantine facilities in vulnerable areas across the country. We also partnered with Proctor & Gamble to distribute more than 700,000 face masks. ReachHealth is now providing PPE and communication materials to local schools to aid in the safe reopening of in-person classes.

Boxes of personal protective equipment destined for health facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic in Cebu City, Philippines. Photo by Robyn Lacson/USAID ReachHealth

7. Prioritizing water, sanitation, and hygiene

Although water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) was not a focus area for ReachHealth, our team recognized that good sanitation and hygiene are critical to slowing the spread of COVID-19. We developed a tool to assess and prioritize sites for handwashing stations and installed these facilities in more than 200 quarantine centers, shelters, and public spaces. We also incorporated WASH messaging into our trainings and messaging campaigns and partnered with the DOH and Procter & Gamble to procure and distribute 70,000 hygiene kits to adults and young people. We have reached over 2.5 million Filipinos with WASH support so far, and our team continues to collaborate with local WASH organizations to bolster their ongoing work.

U.S. Ambassador Sung Kim uses one of the 16 handwashing stations installed in facilities and communities around the city. Photo by Rosana Ombao/USAID ReachHealth

8. Keeping our focus on family planning

Family planning (FP) continues to be an essential health service, especially in times of social and economic uncertainty. While our team stepped up to contribute their expertise to the COVID-19 response, they remain committed to expanding access to quality FP services across the Philippines. In March 2020, 25% of surveyed health centers reported a disruption in FP services and 81% saw a decline in people seeking FP care. From creating online resources to helping service providers improve their teleconsultation abilities, our team rapidly adapted approaches to accommodate the new normal and ensure all Filipinos could continue to access FP care. More than 2,000 teleconsultations on family planning have occurred since.

A team of "Nurses on Wheels" delivers family planning supplies to neighborhood health stations in Cainta. Photo by Mon Joshua Vergara/Cainta Municipal Health Office

U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
Global Health
Global Health Security
COVID-19 Research + Response
Health Systems Strengthening
Primary Health Care in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Interventions and Prevention Programs
Philippines

ReachHealth: Strengthening Access to Critical Services for Filipino Families

Assessing the availability of essential family planning services during covid-19 in the philippines, from hotspots to bright spots: fighting covid-19 in the barangays of the philippines, hope on wheels: delivering vaccines to remote communities, stopping the spread: making covid testing accessible for filipinos.

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Journalism, public health, and COVID-19: some preliminary insights from the Philippines

In this essay, we engage with the call for Extraordinary Issue: Coronavirus, Crisis and Communication. Situated in the Philippines, we reflect on how COVID-19 has made visible the often-overlooked relationship between journalism and public health. In covering the pandemic, journalists struggle with the shrinking space for press freedom and limited access to information as they also grapple with threats to their physical and mental well-being. Digital media enable journalists to report even in quarantine, but new challenges such as the wide circulation of health mis-/disinformation and private information emerge. Moreover, journalists have to contend with broader structural contexts of shutdown not just of a mainstream broadcast but also of community newspapers serving as critical sources of pandemic-related information. Overall, we hope this essay broadens the dialogue among journalists, policymakers, and healthcare professionals to improve the delivery of public health services and advance health reporting.

Introduction

In this essay, we reflect on how COVID-19 has brought to our attention the often-overlooked relationship between journalism and public health. We draw initial insights from critical analysis of media and public health ( Henderson and Hilton, 2018 ) to suggest that health reporting in the country during the pandemic can be connected to journalistic practices, technological changes, and structural constraints. For journalism to advance public health, it needs to contend with the pandemic and the context into which it is uniquely situated – both of which are moving targets and difficult to predict. In this essay, we pay attention to the Philippines not just because it has one of the highest COVID 19-related cases and deaths in the world but also because the country is at the crossroads of changes in digital media and shrinking space for media freedom, as evidenced by the shutdown of the country’s biggest media network, closing or suspension of community newspapers, and passage of laws that may restrict free speech. In doing so, we hope to broaden dialogue among journalists, policymakers, and healthcare professionals to improve the delivery of public health services as well as advance health reporting.

Similar to other countries, the public health system in the Philippines was unprepared for and overburdened by COVID-19. The first case was reported on January 30 when a Chinese woman reached the country from Wuhan, China, and then a few days later her male companion died of the virus – making it the first recorded death outside of China ( Department of Health (DOH), 2020b ; Ramzy and May, 2020 ; World Health Organization (WHO), 2020a ). By March 7, the first case of local transmission was confirmed ( DOH, 2020a ; WHO, 2020a ). To date, there are 112,593 confirmed cases, 6,263 new cases, and 2,115 deaths in the country ( WHO, 2020b ) – making the Philippines as one of the most highly impacted in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific Region. Equally alarming is the number of doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff who get infected and die of COVID-19 ( CNN Philippines, 2020a ; McCarthy, 2020 ). Recently, professional medical and allied medical associations have called for a unified and calibrated response and temporary quarantine of the country’s capital to avoid a total collapse of the healthcare system ( Batnag, 2020 ). Critical but seldom discussed are the challenges of journalism in making sense of the rapid spread and devastating impact of COVID-19 in the Philippines and how the pandemic is also gradually transforming journalism in the country.

Journalism and public health work together to broaden health information sources, facilitate public understanding of health, and mobilize support for or against public health policy ( Henderson and Hilton, 2018 ; Larsson et al., 2003 ; Vercellesi et al., 2010 ) and this relationship is magnified during pandemics. The relationship between journalism and public health has mostly been explained based on journalistic roles and news framing. During the 2009 H1N1, for instance, Klemm et al. (2017) found that journalists shifted from ‘watchdogs’ to ‘cooperative’ roles. Holland et al. (2014) further argued that the 2009 H1N1 enabled journalists to be reflexive of their roles especially with conflicts of interest among experts and decision makers. News framing has likewise informed the conversations between journalism and public health. For example, Krishnatray and Gadekar (2014) found that fear and panic dominated the frames used by journalists in their news stories about the 2009 H1N1. In this essay, we hope to engage with ongoing discussion about journalism and public health by reflecting on how health reporting during COVID-19 in the Philippines relates to broader, emergent, and interconnected issues of journalistic practices, technological changes, and structural constraints in the country.

Reporting from home

COVID-19, along with the ensuing quarantines, poses challenges to existing journalistic practices that typically require fieldwork, but it also encourages journalists in the Philippines to reimagine news production. We observe that access to information has generally been limited because government offices have not been in full operation while virtual press briefings do not allow for a more open discussion between journalists and officials. To illustrate, Ilagan (2020) reported that most routine requests for information have not been processed since March 2020 when government offices were wholly or partly closed due to the ongoing quarantine. The Philippines is among many governments in the world that had to suspend the processing of freedom-of-information (FOI) requests because of the pandemic ( McIntosh, 2020 ). FOI officers working from home could not address requests because they lacked Internet connection, laptop computers, and scanners, including digital copies of files. They also found it difficult to coordinate remotely with record custodians. While some national agencies have been proactive in providing information on COVID-19, the same cannot be said for many local government units. Ilagan (2020) further noted that ‘[un]like frontline agencies at the national level, local governments do not proactively publish data on their websites’. Information about plans to combat the impact of the virus are usually available, but more prodding is needed to find out how these plans are being implemented and funded. Camus (2020) also reported that journalists were prohibited from covering what is happening in hospitals and other high-risk areas. More and more press briefings have thus taken place online, but reporters have found it harder to demand answers because officials and their staff often screen questions. For instance, Camus (2020) wrote that some questions from journalists were ignored while official reports from the government were consistently discussed.

Moreover, we observe that the pandemic has taken a toll on both the physical and mental well-being of journalists. Reported cases of journalists experiencing high levels of stress, undergoing self-quarantines, and at least one news anchor contracting the virus point to the need for broader safety measures at the organizational level of news outlets. The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) lamented the limited mental health support for journalists by saying that ‘there are hardly any readily available and sustained support systems for colleagues experiencing mental health issues’ ( Adel, 2020 ). Safeguarding the physical and psychological well-being of journalists during pandemics or any type of crisis does not rest on individuals alone but should be demanded from news organizations and advocated for by professional associations. Yet some journalists have been able to navigate the consequences of COVID-19 on the profession by reimagining newsgathering, taking advantage of online resources as well as doing collaborations.

First, journalists have been coping with the challenge of limited access to information by interviewing sources through phones and attending webinars with experts to learn more about the pandemic ( Tantuco, 2020 ). Bolledo (2020) said that journalists had to adapt in light of the global health crisis changing media operations. By adapting, he referred to Reuters’ approaches to comprehensive newsgathering, which focus on open-source and non-mainstream techniques such as ‘citizen and collaborative journalism’ and ‘social journalism’. In practice, this set of methods includes monitoring Facebook and Twitter feeds, joining Facebook groups created for a specific cause or geographical area, following hashtags and using keywording to find leads and sources. Bolledo (2020) also emphasized the need to fact-check information gathered using these methods, highlighting the importance of news values and the 5Ws and one H in reporting. Second, to address the barriers in online press briefings, journalists organized themselves to raise their unanswered questions in media group chats of government organizations ( Ilagan, 2020 ). Third, the NUJP organized peer support networks critical for minimizing stress and trauma among journalists who reported about and during COVID-19. Finally, in an effort to prevent contracting and spreading the virus among co-workers, journalists are maintaining records of their activities and a list of sources whom they interacted for purposes of contact tracing ( Camus, 2020 ). The new methods employed in health reporting, as creative responses to the constraints brought upon by COVID-19, partly illustrate how an emerging practice may turn into professional norm ( Henderson and Hilton, 2018 ) in health reporting during pandemic.

Double-edged sword

At the onset of COVID-19, journalism in the Philippines has struggled with ongoing technological changes that bring about double-edged consequences. On one hand, digital media has enabled journalists to help Filipinos make better sense of the pandemic – from reporting infections and deaths regularly to covering press conferences organized by agencies at the frontlines of COVID-19 response. Through Facebook live videos, Zoom , and other video conferencing applications, journalists are able to talk about their lived experiences in covering COVID-19. Various groups inside and outside of the Philippines have been hosting a series of webinars on how to cover the pandemic. Media groups in the Philippines meanwhile have also organized press briefings that tackle the state of news reporting in the country. In the forum titled ‘Intrepid Journalism in the Time of Corona’ organized by This Side Up Manila , two journalists discussed the state of news from the early stages of the pandemic to the declaration of enhanced community quarantine (ECQ). Early in the live video, they shared their frustrations about the consequences of COVID-19 on fieldwork and storytelling. According to the reporters, covering COVID-19 is different from reporting about natural disasters or conflict zones because they felt that there was no end in sight to the pandemic. As a result, they reminded themselves and their colleagues to find a balance and slow down as the pandemic may be prolonged and even put the lives of their families at risk. These webinars, which are in theory accessible to anyone in the world, also allow journalists to share their experiences with and learn from their counterparts in other countries. For instance, Hivos organized a webinar titled ‘Data Driven Reporting During Covid-19’ with journalists from the Philippines, Kenya, and Mexico to find out how they have been affected by and coping with the pandemic. The journalists said they have found collaboration or working with other journalists and members of the academe and civil society as key in reporting when fieldwork is not possible. Like the Philippines, too, Kenya and Mexico also experience barriers in accessing and reporting information while their governments too are also mandating policies that could restrict press freedom ( Hivos, 2020 ).

On the other hand, digital media has complicated the work of journalists as they had to deal with the spread of health mis- and/or disinformation. To partly explain the diffusion of online fake news (e.g. mass testing and vaccines), we engage with Tandoc et al. (2018) who emphasized the characteristics of technology and the role of audiences. For instance, social media made it challenging for journalists to delineate information sources from each other, especially given the evolving science of COVID-19. Because science is evolving, journalists tend to rely heavily on expert opinion, without verifying the experts’ assumptions. Correcting mis- and/ or disinformation about the pandemic was likewise difficult because journalists had limited understanding of what counted as fake news among Filipinos. Another problem that journalists had to contend with while working during the pandemic is the recent ‘data breach’ that used Facebook profiles of real people ( Robles et al., 2020 ). The rise of fake Facebook accounts is counterproductive not just to fight against health mis- and/or disinformation but also places the identities of journalists at risk. To a large extent, the proliferation of health mis- and/ or disinformation is inextricably connected to the social context not just of COVID-19 but also the Philippines. As Tandoc et al. (2018) pointed out, ‘fake news needs the nourishment of troubled times in order to take root. Social tumult and divisions facilitate our willingness to believe news that confirms our enmity toward another group’ (p. 149). While it created new issues, COVID-19 has also reinforced existing problems in the country and one of those is the shrinking space for free speech.

Shutdowns, suspensions, and shrinking spaces

The pandemic is also laying bare pre-existing conditions hounding the Philippine press in a supposed democracy. For instance, the government passed ‘The Bayanihan to Heal as One Act’ (Republic Act No. 11469) to give the president emergency powers that would enable him to quickly respond to COVID-19. Human rights and media advocates criticized this law as it included a provision penalizing ‘fake news’, which can easily be used and abused by those in power to file complaints against individuals, including journalists ( Freedom for Media, Freedom for All Network, 2020 ). Again this posed another challenge to journalists and the audience who both use social media as a means to get and share information. In similar vein, the passage of the ‘ Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 ’ (Republic Act No. 11479) received pushback for its broad provisions. Human rights groups also say that the law has essentially also criminalized intent, which could send a chilling effect especially among journalists who might be working on stories critical of the government.

On 5 May 2020, ABS-CBN, the country’s largest media network, went off-air after its broadcast franchise expired. The House of Representatives, which oversees the granting of franchises, refused ABS-CBN’s bid for a renewal, which ultimately led the media giant to close its broadcast operations and lay off thousands of employees. This development comes after the conviction of Rappler executive editor Maria Ressa and former researcher-writer Reynaldo Santos Jr for supposedly violating the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 (Republic Act No. 10175). The shutdown is seen as the latest in a series of attacks and threats against news organizations deemed as critical of the current administration ( Gutierrez, 2020 ; Pago, 2020 ). Community journalism is neither spared. At least half of some 60 community newspapers have suspended or ceased printing due to economic losses caused by the quarantine, according to estimates from the Philippine Press Institute, the national association of newspapers. The NUJP also raised economic difficulties confronting many freelance journalists, especially those who work on contract in broadcast, since the start of the lockdown. Suspension of operations means that contractual media workers would not be able to earn because work is not available. The halt in the production of news by ABS-CBN and various papers across the archipelago means that people, especially those in far-flung areas, have fewer sources of news at a time when getting information is most crucial. Again, these developments point to how pandemic reportage may be tied to political landscape in the country ( Henderson and Hilton, 2018 ).

COVID-19 is transforming the practice and business of journalism. On one hand, the pandemic and the ensuing quarantine restrictions have prompted news organizations and journalists to adapt and take advantage of digital media to continue gathering and presenting news. On the other hand, the pandemic has also exposed journalists and audiences alike to further mis- and/ or disinformation as well as to government’s new efforts to stamp out ‘fake news’. These developments run in parallel with threats to press freedom and journalist safety. In a pandemic, journalists are not mere observers or mere reporters as they also face the same risks everyone else is exposed to ( CNN Philippines, 2020b ). By laying out the current media environment in this essay, we hope to expand and deepen the conversation between and among journalists, policymakers, and healthcare professionals about public health reporting. In line with Larsson et al. (2003) , we encourage further conversations between journalists and healthcare professionals to collectively identify gaps in health reporting and broaden understanding of ‘fake news’ and how it thrives in social media. Consistent with Tandoc et al. (2018) , we also recommend that journalists and healthcare professionals listen to their audience to help understand what counts as health-related ‘fake news’ for them. Moreover, we invite policymakers to protect democratic spaces that enable journalists, healthcare professionals, and citizens alike to gather and share information related to COVID-19. At a time when disseminating reliable information and holding the powerful to account have never been more critical, we deem it necessary to understand where journalists are coming from to understand both the long-standing and emerging issues they have to grapple with in a pandemic.

Authors’ note: The views provided in this essay do not represent the official views of the authors’ institutional affiliations.

Funding: The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Philippines

The Philippines Still Hasn’t Fully Reopened Its Schools Because of COVID-19. What Is This Doing to Children?

Remote Learning Aims To Bridge Philippines Pandemic Gaps

I f 17-year-old Ruzel Delaroso needs to ask her teacher a question, she can’t simply raise her hand, much less fire off an email from the kitchen table. She has to leave the modest shack that her family calls home in Januiay, a farming town in the central Philippines, and head to an area of dense shrubbery, a 10-minute walk away. There, if she’s lucky, she can pick up a phone signal and finally ask about the math problem in the self-learning materials her mother picked up from school.

“We’re so used to our teachers always being around,” Delaroso tells TIME via the same temperamental phone connection. “But now it’s harder to communicate with them.”

Her school, Calmay National High School, is among the tens of thousands of Philippine public schools shuttered since March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Delaroso is one of 1.6 billion children affected by worldwide school closures, according to a UNESCO estimate.

But while other countries have taken the opportunity to resume in-person classes, the Philippines has lagged behind. After 20 months of pandemic prevention measures, amounting to one of the world’s longest lockdowns , only 5,000 students, in just over 100 public schools, have been allowed to go back to class in a two-month trial program—a tiny fraction of the 27 million public school students who enrolled this year. The Philippines must be one of a very few countries, if not the only country, to remain so reliant on distance learning. It has become a vast experiment in life without in-person schooling.

Read More: What It’s Like Being a Teacher During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“[Education secretary Leonor Briones] always reminds us that in the past when there were military sieges, or volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, typhoons, floods, learning continued,” says education undersecretary Diosdado San Antonio.

But has it this time? Educators fear that prolonged closure is having negative effects on students’ ability to learn, impacting their futures just a time when the country needs a young, well-educated workforce to resume the impressive economic growth it was enjoying before the pandemic hit.

Globally, COVID-19 will be impacting the mental health of children and young adolescents for years to come, UNICEF warns. School shutdowns have already been blamed for a rise in dropout rates and decreased literacy, and the World Bank estimates that the number of children aged 10 and below, from low- and middle-income countries, who cannot read simple text has risen from 53% prior to the pandemic to 70% today.

If the pilot resumption of classes passes without incident, there are hopes for a wider reopening of Philippine schools. But without it, there are fears of a lost generation .

How COVID-19 impacted Philippine education

From March 2020 to September 2021, UNICEF tallied 131 million pre-tertiary students from 11 countries who had been trying to learn at home for at least three quarters of the time that they would normally have been in school. Of that number, 66 million came from just two countries where face-to-face classes were almost completely nixed: Bangladesh and the Philippines. (Bangladesh reopened its schools in September.)

Amid the initial COVID-19 surge of March 2020—just weeks shy of the end of the academic year—the Philippines stopped in-person classes for its entire cohort of public education students, which then numbered some 24.9 million according to UNESCO. The start of the new school year in September also got pushed back, as President Rodrigo Duterte imposed a “no vaccine, no classes” policy.

When schooling finally resumed in October 2020, the education department’s solution was a blend of remote-learning options: online platforms, educational TV and radio, and printed modules. But social inequalities and the lack of resources at home to support these approaches have dealt a huge blow to many students and teachers.

A departmental report released in March 2021 found that 99% of public school students got passing marks for the first academic quarter of last year. But other surveys claim that students are being disadvantaged. Over 86% of the 1,299 students polled by the Movement for Safe, Equitable, Quality and Relevant Education said they learned less through the education department’s take-home modules—so did 66% of those using online learning and 74% using a blend of online learning and hard-copy material.

Read More: Angelina Jolie on Why We Can Let COVID-19 Derail Education

Even though she’s an academic topnotcher—getting a weighted grade average of 91 out of 100 last year—Delaroso also feels that remote learning is inferior.

At Delaroso’s high school, teacher Johnnalie Consumo, 25, has detected a lack of eagerness to study, with some parents even filling in worksheets on their child’s behalf—going by the evidence of the handwriting.

“They have a hard time forcing the kid to answer modules because the kid isn’t intimidated by their parents,” she tells TIME. “The way a teacher encourages is very different from how a parent would.”

Consumo sometimes visits the homes of under-performing students and finds that they are out doing farm work—harvesting sugar cane, say, or making charcoal—to augment a family income that has been slashed by a suffering economy and a rising unemployment rate . Exercise books have been turned in blank, she says. Or students appear to pass their modules, only for her to find that they copied the answers. The frustration is enormous.

“It’s hard on our part,” Consumo tells TIME, “because we really try our best.”

Philippines Resumes Face To Face Learning After Two Years Of Covid-Related School Closures

Poverty and education in the Philippines

Internet access is a huge challenge. In urban areas, instructors can give lessons over video conferencing platforms, or Facebook Live, but 52.6% of the Philippines’ 110 million people live in rural areas with unreliable connectivity. It doesn’t come cheap either: research from cybersecurity firm SurfShark found that the internet in the Philippines is among the least stable and slowest, yet the most expensive, of 79 countries surveyed.

Internet access assumes, of course, that the user has a device, but in the Philippines that’s not a given. Private polling firm Social Weather Stations found that just over 40% of students did not have any device to help them in distance learning. Of the rest, some 27% were using a device they already owned, and 10% were able to borrow one, but 12% had to buy one, with families spending an average of $172 per learner. To put it into perspective, that’s more than half the average monthly salary in the Philippines.

“Some of them don’t have cell phones,” says Marilyn Tomelden, a teacher in Quezon province, three hours away from the Philippine capital Manila, who first noticed the digital divide when many of her sixth graders were unable to comply with what she thought of as a fun homework assignment: submitting videos of themselves performing dance moves she had demonstrated in an earlier video.

“Because we’re in public school, we cannot demand that they buy phones,” Tomelden says. “They don’t have money to buy their own food, and they’re going to buy their own cell phone for learning? Which is more important to live—to eat or to study?”

Instructors need to be equipped with the right resources too. A study from the National Research Council of the Philippines found that many teachers have had to shell out their own money to support their students in remote learning.

Read More: The Long History of Vaccinating Kids in School

Government agencies do what they can to help. Earlier this year, the customs bureau donated phones and other gadgets it had confiscated to the education department for distribution to needy students. But it’s a drop in the ocean.

“It’s something that is beyond [our] capacity to address—the inequality in terms of availability of resources of learners, depending on the socioeconomic status of families,” says education undersecretary San Antonio.

Some students are so exhausted by the struggle to study remotely that they are calling for long breaks between modules. Many parents and pressure groups are going even further, demanding total academic suspension until a clearer post-pandemic education system is ironed out.

Congresswoman France Castro is a member of ACT Teachers Partylist, a political party representing the education sector. She says a complete freeze would cause more problems than it solves.

“Education is a right,” she tells TIME. “Whatever form it will be, whether blended learning or modular, it’s better to continue it than to stop.”

But in the meantime, with their workloads multiplied, it is students and teachers paying the price. Consumo, the teacher from Januiay, regularly stays up late completing the reams of new paperwork generated by the distance learning system.

“You won’t be able to sleep anymore, just thinking about the deadlines and the work that still needs to be done,” she says. “I cry over that.”

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Learning should reach the most vulnerable, unicef says, as classes resume on 5 october, unicef emphasizes the important role that education plays in shaping children’s futures, especially amid the covid-19 pandemic..

Melecio sibling do their home work together during COVID-19

MANILA, 2 October 2020 – As classes resume on 5 October, UNICEF emphasizes the important role that education plays in shaping children’s futures, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The UN agency for children’s rights lauds the Philippine Government’s decision to start classes with blended approaches to suit the specific needs of Filipino schoolchildren.

UNICEF reiterates that COVID-19 is not just a health crisis, but also a learning crisis. The sheer scale at which school children have gone unreached constitutes an education emergency on a global scale. The repercussions could be felt in economies and societies for decades to come.

During times of crises and emergencies such as COVID-19, children experience stress, fear, and anxiety. Schools do much more than teach children how to read, write and count. Schools help bring a sense of normalcy to children’s lives.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed high risks for disadvantaged children already lagging behind on learning.

Equity should be placed at the core of education interventions to provide the same learning opportunity to children who are most vulnerable and are from the most marginalized communities. Inability to address these fuels inequality and reverses progress made in recent decades.

Evidence shows that for the most marginalized and vulnerable, missing out on school may lead to child labor, teenage pregnancy, and other situations that can keep them trapped in the cycle of poverty. Children with disabilities and children from indigenous groups, whose risk to be left behind has been magnified in this context, should also be prioritized to prevent negative outcomes that can last a lifetime. Postponing learning, despite the availability of alternative means, makes it less likely that they will ever return to school.

UNICEF, together with other partners, supported the Department of Education (DepEd) in the development of the Basic Education Learning Continuity Plan, as well as capacity building for enhancing the online learning platform, DepEd Commons. Rural multigrade schools benefited from technological packages while young learners received home-based story books. Learning boxes and an online platform were provided for students in the Alternative Learning System (ALS) to fulfil their right to have access to free and complete basic education. Technical support is on-going for various webinars on parent engagement, child rights advocacies, psychosocial support, and learning opportunities for children with disabilities.

UNICEF remains committed to work with DepEd and other partners to uphold every child’s right to education amid the pandemic. Part of its upcoming response initiatives include support to DepEd’s intersectoral collaborations to promote health and social protection of children, a community-based communication campaign to increase ALS enrollment, and preparation of a Basic Education Sector Plan that will specify longer term strategies for quality inclusive education.

On decisions involving re-opening of schools and holding face-to-face classes, UNICEF continues to advocate for phased re-opening of schools in low risks areas, as shown effective in other countries. We urge the government and authorities to look at the benefits and risks across education, public health, and socio-economic factors, in the local context, using the best available evidence. The best interest of every child should be paramount in all these decisions, as outlined by the Framework for Reopening Schools , issued jointly with UNESCO, UNHCR, WFP, and the World Bank and the revised guidance by WHO, UNESCO, and UNICEF on Considerations for school-related public health measures in the context of COVID-19 . ###

Note to Editors:

Statement attributable to Ms. Oyunsaikhan Dendevnorov, Country Representative, UNICEF Philippines

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UNICEF promotes the rights and wellbeing of every child, in everything we do. Together with our partners, we work in 190 countries and territories to translate that commitment into practical action, focusing special effort on reaching the most vulnerable and excluded children, to the benefit of all children, everywhere.

For more information about UNICEF and its work for children in the Philippines, visit www.unicef.ph .

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Community Reflections

My life experience during the covid-19 pandemic.

Melissa Blanco Follow

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Undergraduate, Class of 2024

My content explains what my life was like during the last seven months of the Covid-19 pandemic and how it affected my life both positively and negatively. It also explains what it was like when I graduated from High School and how I want the future generations to remember the Class of 2020.

Class assignment, Western Civilization (Dr. Marino).

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Blanco, Melissa, "My Life Experience During the Covid-19 Pandemic" (2020). Community Reflections . 21. https://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/covid19-reflections/21

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'We have to do something': Philippine schools, students grapple with floods as climate change forces them to adapt

Philippines looks to import more rice in case of El Nino losses

Hotter and longer heatwaves.

As climate change fuels the frequency and severity of heatwaves, the problems faced by teachers and students in the Philippines look set to play out elsewhere.

About 243 million children in Asia and the Pacific are expected to be exposed to hotter and longer heatwaves over the coming months, the UN children's agency, UNICEF, said last week.

Children are particularly susceptible to heat stroke, and UNICEF said prolonged exposure to intense heat also impacts their ability to concentrate and learn.

Since the start of El Nino, "danger category" temperatures as high as 44 degrees Celsius have been predicted by the country's weather agency.

Filipino teachers say more measures are needed to deal with extreme heat in schools - from tackling shortages of classrooms and teachers, which lead to overcrowding, to providing free drinking water and having a school nurse or doctor on site.

The Alliance of Concerned Teachers has called on the Department of Education (DepEd) to address such issues.

It has also proposed the immediate reversion to the pre-pandemic school calendar, when the hot months of April and May fell during the long school break.

Asked to comment, a DepEd spokesperson said its policy of letting head teachers decide when to switch to online or offline home classes "provides a more immediate and effective response to heat conditions rather than knee-jerk changes that would further compromise learning recovery".

Some teachers say the current situation also underlines the need for more education about climate change.

"Climate change has not been comprehensively taught in our classrooms. But it's a pressing issue linked to all the other challenges our education system is facing now," Bernardo said.

For many low-paid public sector teachers, working in packed schools with non-existent or inadequate cooling has been the last straw.

"The heat makes me want to resign or retire early," said Alfonso.

First COVID-19, now heat: Online schooling returns to the Philippines

Record heat in the Philippines this month has forced schools to send children home for online classes, reviving memories of COVID-19 lockdowns and raising fears that more extreme weather in the years to come could deepen educational inequalities.

Pupils at 7,000 public schools in the Philippines were sent home last week due to unusually hot weather in many areas that forecasters have linked to the effects of the El Niño weather phenomenon.

While teachers are providing offline assignments for students without internet access, Alfonso said the arrangement left children with no one to raise questions with.

In public schools in Metro Manila, the capital region, a survey of more than 8,000 teachers last month showed 87% of students had suffered from heat-related conditions.

Nearly half or 46% of teachers said classrooms have only one or two electric fans, highlighting inadequate ventilation measures to deal with rising temperatures.

Hotter and longer heatwaves

As climate change fuels the frequency and severity of heatwaves, the problems faced by teachers and students in the Philippines look set to play out elsewhere.

About 243 million children in Asia and the Pacific are expected to be exposed to hotter and longer heatwaves over the coming months, the UN children's agency, UNICEF, said last week.

Children are particularly susceptible to heat stroke, and UNICEF said prolonged exposure to intense heat also impacts their ability to concentrate and learn.

Since the start of El Niño, "danger category" temperatures as high as 44 degrees Celsius (111 Fahrenheit) have been predicted by country's weather agency.

The Alliance of Concerned Teachers has called on the Department of Education (DepEd) to address such issues.

It has also proposed the immediate reversion to the pre-pandemic school calendar, when the hot months of April and May fell during the long school break.

Some teachers say the current situation also underlines the need for more education about climate change.

"Climate change has not been comprehensively taught in our classrooms. But it's a pressing issue linked to all the other challenges our education system is facing now," Bernardo said.

For many low-paid public sector teachers, working in packed schools with non-existent or inadequate cooling has been the last straw.

"The heat makes me want to resign or retire early," said Alfonso. — Thomson Reuters Foundation

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Philippines' Covid-19 journey: 4 years later

Like many countries, the Philippines was not immune to the initial shockwaves of the Covid-19 pandemic.

To curb the rising number of infections, one of the Philippine government's first responses was to implement lockdowns, later categorized into "alert levels."

Four years ago, on March 15, 2020, Metro Manila was first placed under an enhanced community quarantine (ECQ).

On March 17, the strictest quarantine level was implemented in Luzon. Several areas of the country were then subjected to varying degrees of alert levels as the nation continued to grapple with the impacts of the pandemic.

In May 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) formally declared that Covid-19 was "no longer a global health emergency."

Two months later, in July 2023, President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. also lifted the "state of public health emergency" declared due to Covid-19.

Stronger and better-prepared health system

While the pandemic exposed weaknesses in the country's healthcare system, the Department of Health (DOH) believed it also paved the way for transformative improvements in healthcare response.

"Moving forward, we have learned our lessons, and we now know better," said Health Secretary Teodoro Herbosa in a statement issued on March 14.

DOH Officer-in-Charge Assistant Secretary and Deputy Spokesperson Dr. Albert Domingo also shared significant details about the country's Covid-19 journey during an interview on March 14.

Domingo noted that four years since the Philippines declared the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the average daily nationwide new cases now hover around only 25 to 30.

"In terms of health utilization, our number of occupied beds in percentage," Domingo said. "Whereas before, the highest reached 70 to 74 percent, now it's down to only 11 to 15 percent," he added.

Domingo furthered that the "denominator" of the number of Covid beds has significantly decreased. "Before, there were around 10,000 beds nationwide, but now only about 1,000 beds remain," he said.

In response to inquiries about the Philippines' readiness for future pandemics, Domingo said: "We are very much prepared."

He noted the transformation of previous temporary treatment and monitoring facilities (TTMF) into safe Covid facilities, which commenced on March 6.

Domingo also announced the conversion of the former TTMF into the New Urgent Care and Ambulatory Service Center (BUCAS) in Sto. Tomas, Pampanga, stated that these centers can serve as isolation facilities if needed during another pandemic.

Covid-19 status nationwide

As the Philippines emerged from the grips of the pandemic, the DOH highlighted a sense of cautious optimism.

The DOH emphasized that at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in the Philippines, there were as many as 34,903 new cases per day on average in January 2022.

For healthcare utilization, the highest occupancy of total Covid-19 beds was at 71 percent and ICU beds at 74 percent in September 2021, with many more beds dedicated then, which were 35,499 in total, than now at 11,842.

However, as of the latest data on March 14th, the DOH reported only 251 new Covid-19 cases in the country.

Citing data from Feb. 27 to March 4, DOH records showed that the daily average of Covid-19 cases in the country is now 36, which is 27 percent lower than the previous week's average from Feb. 20 to 26.

The DOH highlighted that of the newly reported Covid-19 cases, only three patients were in "severe or critical condition."

Meanwhile, DOH also noted that there were seven deaths. Of these, five occurred from Feb. 20 to March 4.

Moreover, DOH records also showed that as of March 14, there were 115, or 10 percent, severe and critical patients admitted to hospitals due to Covid-19.

DOH said 115, or 10 percent, of the 1,185 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds allocated for Covid-19 patients were occupied, while 1,119, or 11 percent, of the 10,097 non-ICU Covid-19 beds were also in use.

Regarding the vaccination status, Domingo emphasized the importance of receiving basic vaccinations for previous strains.

DOH also credits this low severity and fatality to the protection given by the health agency's high vaccination coverage.

"The coverage is high, and for additional variants, we have to be vaccinated if an individual is considered high-risk," he said.

Domingo noted that there will be more vaccines to come. "Covax may have disappeared, but the Global Alliance for Vaccines has taken its place. It just changed its name, but it's the same," he added.

Despite the unprecedented challenges, the Philippines' journey through the Covid-19 pandemic, as reflected in the current changes, can be described as a story of resilience, adaptability, and collective determination."

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A St. Louis Museum Revisits a Famous but Complex World’s Fair

A new exhibit at the Missouri History Museum examines “the triumphant side and the tragic side” of the 1904 spectacle to present a fuller story.

A big banner hangs above glass cases of museum artifacts. It shows a sepia-toned photo of Geronimo.

By Valerie Schremp Hahn

Reporting from St. Louis

This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.

In the final scene of the 1944 musical film “Meet Me in St. Louis,” the Smith family, dressed in fancy attire, wanders the grounds of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, better known as the 1904 World’s Fair. Daylight fades, the electric lights flash on and the group stops in its tracks.

“I can’t believe it,” Judy Garland, playing Esther Smith, says breathlessly. “Right here where we live. Right here in St. Louis.”

A new exhibit about the fair opens here this month at the Missouri History Museum. It shines a light on the wonder and complexity of the seven-month spectacle, still a mythical, sometimes pinnacle moment in the minds of many St. Louisans.

As the exhibit explains, the fair was where a vendor might have created the ice cream cone, but it was also where vendors might not have served Black people.

It was where governments of more than 60 nations came together to show off artwork, furniture and marvels, including the Liberty Bell and two butter sculptures of President Theodore Roosevelt. But it was also where spectators gawked at more than 1,000 Filipinos who came to live on the grounds of a 47-acre reconstructed village known as the Philippine Reservation as part of a living exhibition.

It was where scientists and engineers showed off technology like electricity, the wireless telegraph and baby incubators. But it was also where up to 39 out of 43 babies on display in the incubator exhibit died because of unsafe conditions. It was new technology at the time. The exhibit was run by an inexperienced doctor, the babies got a poor diet and the incubators overheated, the museum explains.

The fair stories about the ice cream cone and the much-loved 264-foot Ferris wheel that was sent down from Chicago are good ones, said Jody Sowell, president and chief executive of the Missouri Historical Society, which runs the museum.

“But I am convinced that most visitors want the full story,” Sowell said. “They want both the triumphant side and the tragic side, and they can handle both. And in fact, they get suspicious when they think one side’s being left out.”

The fair was meant to celebrate progress — namely, the commemoration of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase that doubled the size of the country. The fair’s opening was delayed by a year in order to complete the large-scale preparations. The exhibition covered around 1,200 acres, about two square miles, more than half of which took over the western end of Forest Park.

The museum, now in the park, stands on the site of the fair entrance. The building, the first national monument to Thomas Jefferson, was constructed in 1913 using fair proceeds.

In 2022, in another reinterpretation of a complex story, the museum installed labels around the building lobby’s Jefferson statue, acknowledging that the Declaration of Independence author and former president enslaved more than 600 people and that his Louisiana Purchase (from France) ultimately stripped Native Americans of their ancestral lands.

One label asks, “Can we still be moved by Jefferson’s words but horrified by his actions?”

“That’s an answer that I could give you as a historian,” Sowell said. “Or I can say, ‘Let me tell you the story and then open this up to a dialogue and let you have this conversation.’”

The exhibit’s centerpiece, a massive, 3-D-printed map of the fairgrounds, shows off nearly 300 of the fair’s buildings and structures, most of which were meant to be temporary. Projectors bring the map to life with color and movement, showing tiny figures walking the grounds.

The map is meant to wow visitors. It’s also meant to help them orient themselves in space, time and thought.

Sharon Smith, the museum’s curator of civic and personal identity, found herself peering at the map to find the location of the fair’s re-enactments of the Anglo-Boer War, now known as the South African War. The war between Britain and two South African republics had ended two years before the fair opened, and some of its veterans staged battles twice daily for fairgoers who paid 50 cents (about $17.50 today) to watch.

“I’m looking at that model,” Smith said. “And I’m thinking, ‘That’s where that was.’” She said that she had heard of it but that “I never really examined it so deeply because we didn’t have to, or we didn’t choose to.”

Nearby hangs a print by the artist Ria Unson , whose great-grandfather Ramon Ochoa came from the Philippines as a teenager to work as a waiter and guide at the fair’s Philippine Reservation, also represented in the 3-D map.

The artwork is based on a photograph of her uncle, Ramon Unson, his grandfather’s namesake, and contains overlays of newspaper articles about the reservation. It’s her way of reclaiming the narrative, Ria Unson said.

“The fair is actually material evidence of when America chose to be an empire,” she said in an interview.

The Philippines had been colonized by the United States in 1898, and her great-grandfather served as an example of what a “civilized” Filipino could become, she said. He then went to school in Oswego, N.Y., northwest of Syracuse, and became Americanized by his experience. She grew up in the Philippines speaking American English and now lives in St. Louis.

“The past continues to impose itself on the present,” Unson said. “And we will be creating a certain kind of future because of who we are in the present.”

Linda Young Nance, who grew up in St. Louis, is the historian for the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. She helped the museum create a digital walking tour and video about the Black experience at the fair. The National Association of Colored Women had met in St. Louis for their convention in 1904 but boycotted the fair after several members were treated poorly there, even denied cups of water.

While Young Nance says the fair was wonderful and glorious in many ways, she worries that some people in St. Louis, which has a long history of racial division, won’t be prepared to hear a more complete story. But they may learn something, she said.

“So when they come, they get to learn the whole story about our city, and they also get to learn that we are a city that is at least working toward including everybody and stories of all of us that are here. If you don’t keep working toward equity, you’ll never get it.”

The exhibit dazzles with fair memorabilia: dozens of pieces of ruby red glassware like ones that still appear in local antiques shops, the clockworks from the fair’s giant floral clock and the desk of David R. Francis, a former mayor of St. Louis and governor of Missouri who was president of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. He famously closed the fair with the words “Farewell, a long farewell to all thy splendor!” before throwing the switch to turn off the lights.

As for the movie “Meet Me in St. Louis,” a beloved classic, the exhibit includes a movie poster and a screen playing clips, including the final scene.

It’s a movie Sowell loves, about a complex chapter that took place right here in St. Louis, a complex city he also loves.

“There are these great inspirational chapters in St. Louis’ history that can help us get more connected to this place and be more invested in its future,” he said. “We want to look back at the past, again from all of those perspectives, and understand that it’s important to never write a simple story of history.”

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