Pandemic fallacies
Given that we belatedly realized that those tasked to manage the pandemic are far from the best and the brightest the bureaucracy can offer, vetted mostly from entirely different disciplines not even remotely related to public health much less financial and economic management, the unfortunate message is that the task does not require an inordinate amount of apropos intellect and that pandemic wars require warriors.
However, where the enemy is in the quantum realm and the only visible targets are non-combatant innocents, outmoded warfare is inapplicable. This pandemic war is Marawi all over again, but on a grander scale where the military ends up destroying innocent lives along with enemy combatants. When the smoke cleared, Amnesty International could not determine if the employment of artillery and airstrikes by our armed forces breached international humanitarian law.
While the imperative of a crisis requires men who act quickly and decisively, sans the need for discourse or analysis ad nauseam, unfortunately, that might be an oversimplification where it debunks requisite critical analysis, planning and the testing of hypotheses, and the recalibration of responses for the sake of expediency.
The oversimplification likewise leads us to reduce the critical tasks to less than a handful with the appointment of snap-to-attention doers and go-getters. If a quick response is of the essence, it seems we stumbled onto the
right persons even before
“There is a fallacy that pandemic relief runs faster under men trained to fight a war. Reality proves otherwise.
the pandemic broke. But did we?
To manage the negative impact of the pandemic on the most vulnerable government unit, we chose an action man to address the microeconomy at the barangay level. At its most retail, through barangay councils, it makes sense to have a doer at the helm of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).
Keeping in mind the criticality of the barangay through which assistance, ameliorations and subsidies are indeed critical economic lifelines, local governments logically play a significant role.
As the lead agency, the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) is understandable. More so since the kind of hard lockdowns the government has compelled remains the default response to the pandemic. The DILG is the principal agency controlling the police. There is theoretical justification to place the department under a “Rebel Hunter.”
However intrusive, contact tracing is sine qua non in this pandemic. Assigning it to a former police deputy director general whose mission order was to achieve a contact tracing ratio of 1:30 also made conceptual sense.
That established, allow us to validate those concepts with reality and quantifiable consequences.
While a good amount of tax-generated subsidies has been distributed since April 2020, by the end of this April’s two-week enhanced community quarantine only 17.5 percent of the allocated P22.9 billion budget has been disbursed by the DSWD through the DILG units. Citizens complained they were not part of the list of beneficiaries, despite LGU affirmations. Worse, others had yet to receive aid under the social amelioration program from last year.
On contact tracing, from the targeted ratio of 1:30, now 10 months hence, the ratio remains pegged at between 1:3 to 1:5.
There is a fallacy that pandemic relief runs faster under men trained to fight a war. Reality proves otherwise. We’ve not only lost all these battles, but the enemy has completely routed us.
“Where the enemy is in the quantum realm and the only visible targets are non-combatant innocents, outmoded warfare is inapplicable.