ONE Championship: Joshua Pacio’s Team Lakay take supplies to Baguio families struggling during coronavirus

Filipino star Joshua “The Passion” Pacio and his Team Lakay stablemates have been hitting the road this past week, taking much-needed essentials to isolated and often desperate families in the mountains around their Baguio City base.

“This is our community so we have to reach out and help everybody we can,” says the ONE strawweight champion.

While there have been 5,660 confirmed cases of Covid-19 across the Philippines, and 362 deaths, at the time of writing, quick action across the community has helped keep numbers low in Baguio City and surrounds, with local hospitals reporting 17 patients (and one death) from an often-impoverished community that numbers more than 350,000.

But the lockdown has meant that thousands of those living far away from the city and the villages which dot the mountainous region of northern Luzon island have been cut off from their daily supplies of food and other essentials.

“We’ve been giving food to people who are far from the city and haven’t been able to get it for their families,” Pacio says. “There are hundreds of families we can help. There haven’t been that many cases out here but we’ve been in lockdown like everywhere and that has been difficult for the poorer people. This is our home and we are happy to help.”