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Coronavirus pandemic
This Week in AsiaPolitics

Delays and missteps: how Duterte’s Philippines struggled against the coronavirus

  • A top medical expert warns that the country faces a long battle with Covid-19 unless a coherent strategy to fight it is implemented
  • Its response has been marked by bad messaging and poor coordination, and its economy hard hit by one of the world‘s longest lockdowns

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Shoppers were out in force in Manila on Christmas Eve despite the threat of coronavirus transmission. Photo: AFP
Alan RoblesandRaissa Robles
The Philippines will struggle with the coronavirus pandemic for two more years if it does not alter its current strategy to combat the disease and replace the leaders implementing it, according to one of the country’s top medical experts.
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Dr Anthony Leachon, a former senior adviser to the country’s anti-Covid National Task Force, told This Week in Asia the government’s efforts this year “could have been led better with a sense of urgency, agility and teamwork”.

Leachon was sacked from his job by President Rodrigo Duterte in July for saying the government was “losing focus” in its efforts to battle the spread of Covid-19 – criticism that has since turned out to be prophetic. As of Thursday, the country has logged 472,532 cases and 9,230 deaths, making it the second-worst-affected country in Southeast Asia.

Under Duterte, the country’s effort against Covid-19 – defined by one of the world’s longest lockdowns – has been marked by delays, uneven enforcement, missteps, bad messaging and poor coordination. To deal with the pandemic, the president set up and continues to create task forces as well as appointing special leaders, whom the press has taken to calling “tsars”, for the likes of treatment, contact tracing and vaccines. Notably, the key positions are held by former military officers, not medical experts.

Officials are trying to get a vaccination programme off the ground sometime next year, while bracing for the arrival of a more infectious variant of the virus. According to Dr Edsel Salvana of the Department of Health Technical Advisory Group, a molecular epidemiologist of infectious diseases, the prospect for the country getting out of the pandemic’s shadow “depends on how fast we can roll out vaccines”, and said a timeline of one year was “optimistic but doable”.

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Philippines celebrates Christmas with decorations, but Covid-19 cancels parties and big gatherings

Philippines celebrates Christmas with decorations, but Covid-19 cancels parties and big gatherings
But Leachon, the former senior adviser, described government efforts as “quite slow, due to a lack of trust and confidence in the health department chief” – the embattled Francisco Duque – which he said had led to “delays in flattening the curve”. Duque has been widely criticised, with the upper chamber of the Philippine Senate earlier this year accusing him of criminal negligence and gross mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic and recommending he be fired.

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