“Not even the WHO knows the answer.”
This is the big question in the minds of people, including myself. Santa Banana, this year is now the third year of this pandemic and at the rate it is going, there will be more problems ahead. The worst part of it is that nobody, not even the World Health Organization (WHO), seems to know the answer.
We, Filipinos, have gone through so much insofar as the COVID-19 pandemic is concerned. My gulay, we even went through with the worst of lockdowns. My wife and I, for instance, have been under house arrest because of our age.
I had expected that soon enough COVID-19 would end when COVID-19 cases started declining. People felt freer to go out and celebrate the holidays.
But it was only a breather. Now we are seeing surges again because of the Omicron variant.
Hospitals are now beginning to get full again with COVID-19. The worst part of it all is that hospital prices are also going up. Most of the patients involve unvaccinated people.
The worst part of it all is that the economic recovery we were hoping for won’t happen just yet. My gulay, the Philippines, is now classified as “high risk”!
Thus, we go back to the basic question: When will the pandemic end? At the rate things are going, I doubt that the health crisis will end this year. Not with other countries like the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Italy and many others going through their worst health crisis.
It’s really ironic that a Social Weather Stations poll survey found that nine out of 10 Filipinos hope that this year 2022 will be a much better year than last year. As I said in a previous column, the hopes do not seem to match reality.
We can only hope and pray that COVID will end soon.
The country already has suffered so much with the increasing incidence of poverty and unemployment worsened by recurrent typhoons like the latest one, Odette.
Just how aspirants to the presidency, vice presidency and the Senate will help the country is another big question.
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The President has just signed the over P5.7 trillion budget for 2022. But with all the over-borrowing, the country has been undergoing to meet all the exigencies of the COVID-19 pandemic, I am not too hopeful that the national budget will be able to meet all the country’s needs.
But there are many other sources of income, like abolishing some government agencies which not only outlived their use but have since become irrelevant.
First of all, there is the MTRCB or the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board, which by its very nature, is already irrelevant. My gulay, with just a flick of your finger you can now assess yourself to movies from abroad, which makes MTRCB useless.. It would be impossible to rate and classify all the movies from HBO, Netflix and the like.
Communication technology has become borderless making the MTRCB irrelevant.
The other government agencies that should be abolished are the Office of the Government Corporate Counsel which oversees Government-Owned and -Controlled Corporations. It should be abolished and taken over by the Office of the Solicitor-general.
There is also PCGG or Presidential Commission on Good Government, which originally was created to seek unexplained wealth of the Marcoses. But the PCGG commissioners are sitting on their hefty posteriors and milking the remaining sequestered companies. The Department of Justice can take over this one.
Then, there is the Climate Change Commission whose chairman receives salaries as a cabinet member and commissioners getting paid as undersecretaries. My gulay, what have they done? Noting, but attending meetings on climate change abroad. That, too, can be abolished.