DOH fight vs virus also about gaining public trust
Despite the missteps time and again in the government’s management of the coronavirus pandemic, the Department of Health (DOH) said it was trying “to build and maintain the public’s trust and confidence with the national government,” amid this unprecedented crisis.
Yet at the outset of what would become the COVID-19 pandemic, the country’s leaders did not appear to be as alarmed as their counterparts in the region.
President Duterte himself, on numerous occasions, played down the severity of the outbreak, even saying in one of his speeches in February that the virus will “die a natural death.”
Six days before the country reported its first local case in March, Health Secretary Francisco Duque III also differed from the World Health Organization, which at the time warned that the SARS-COV-2 virus, the causative agent of COVID-19, had “pandemic potential.”
Duque pointed out then that such a scenario was “far-off.”
“How many countries are there in the world? You have 195 countries,” he said at the time when 51 countries apart from China were already reporting their first cases.
Duque said “I don’t think it [the outbreak becoming a pandemic] should even be entertained at this point.”
Late travel ban
The country was eventually prompted to impose a travel ban on China, the source of the coronavirus, after Mr. Duterte’s initial reluctance to enforce such a ban. But this restriction was not declared soon enough, as demanded by public opinion.
On one occasion, Mr. Duterte even told off those calling for a ban on Chinese travelers to stop their “xenophobia.”
Equipment, facilities
Back when there was a lull in confirmed cases, Duque proclaimed that “the way it is, our preparedness, readiness are adequate.”
As things transpired, however, the DOH was caught off guard with the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) and inadequate number of laboratories to test COVID-19 cases.
Though there is now enough supply of PPE, this didn’t come without a price, as more than 3,800 health workers became infected and 35 died from the severe respiratory disease.
The number of accredited laboratories grew to 87, but by then, the country was approaching the tail end of its lockdown.
Situations such as these could not help boost public confidence in the government’s handling of the crisis.
Compounding this health crisis were reports of abuse by police and barangay watchmen, illegal and arbitrary arrests, and quarantine violations by high officials—apart from politically charged controversies triggered by Mr. Duterte and his officials and allies that had no direct bearing on the health crisis.
This also paved the way for the proliferation of misinformation at a time when the public was anxious of their safety and well-being.
“Aside from battling the true pandemic, [the] DOH and the whole government is also trying to manage this misinformation,” Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire told reporters last month.
‘Transparency’
But according to the Univesity of the Philippines Resilience Institute executive director Dr. Alfredo Mahar Lagmay, transparency is crucial to inspiring public trust in government.
“Transparency will get people to believe what [the] DOH is saying. How do you build that transparency? If other scientists are able to get a hold of datasets that are not critical to data privacy issues. That will be used to check on whether the datasets are accurate, are making sense when analyzed, corresponding to what’s happening on the ground. And it has to replicate what [the] DOH is saying,” Lagmay said.
“That is what science is all about. You are dealing with scientific method, and science should be replicable. If the datasets are not replicable and do not match what the government is saying then the science breaks down,” he said.
Vergeire said “we’d like to instill trust, we’d like to show people that the government is here working for you, protecting you and your family.”
“We’re providing information to the public, guiding the public on the behavioral messages that we provide so that they can imbibe and instill in themselves these behaviors so that we can prevent transmission,” she said.
“It is not just the government. It’s part of the responsibility of the media and community to combat misinformation and for us to avoid an infodemic. This is the last thing that we need ... in this pandemic situation,” Vergeire said.