00:00 What is your assessment of the country, based on your readings of the country,
00:06 your assessment of the pandemic response in the country,
00:10 and your reaction to the Philippines lifting its state of public health emergency for COVID-19,
00:18 because a few months after the World Health Organization lifted the emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic,
00:25 what are your thoughts about this?
00:28 Thank you. I think when the world started to fight against COVID, I was in here.
00:36 But when I look at the data, given the size of the population of the Philippines,
00:44 I think we can claim, despite the fact that I would regret to say that, you know,
00:51 about 60,000, I'm not mistaken, 66,000 deaths in the Philippines.
00:58 But I would say, comparatively, comparatively, we can say that the management to control the COVID-19
01:09 in the Philippines is quite successful.
01:12 Now, the issue now is that, let's look at it, let's document the stories,
01:19 the success stories that we have done so far, so that we can learn from them.
01:25 Of course, when I say it's a success story, but there are, of course,
01:29 many, many things within those success stories that we can learn from.
01:36 So that's the bottom line.
01:37 Now, the announcement by His Excellency, President of the Philippines,
01:46 I think this is something that has been preceded by the announcement by the Director General of the WHO
01:57 on May 5th, that COVID-19 is no longer a disease of public, yeah, PHEIC, no longer.
02:13 Now, what is this? I mean, when the EG announced this, you know,
02:18 number one is because the world wasn't ready.
02:21 I mean, tell me, no country in the world was ready for that.
02:25 Therefore, we need to raise the awareness, the concern of the global community
02:33 that this is a disease of threat to human beings, right?
02:37 And then at that time, we don't have any tool, right?
02:43 Forget about the test. The test was developed after that.
02:47 And then the last one came to us is this vaccine, right?
02:52 So these kind of things pushed WHO Director General to make that, or to declare COVID.
03:00 Now, let's look at the conditions.
03:03 I think regardless of coverage, I think particularly the booster, we are here still quite low,
03:10 but the tool is there, right? We have the ground to shoot this guy, okay, COVID-19.
03:15 We have vaccine. We have knowledge. We have experience, right?
03:19 Therefore, it's no longer a public health disease of public health concern globally, right?
03:28 However, I would like to remind all of us, despite this announcement, the virus is here.
03:34 It lives with us now, right?
03:37 Therefore, our recommendation to the government is to integrate COVID-19,
03:44 including COVID-19 vaccination, into its routine program.
03:49 So that we can do while we continue to do a good surveillance of which we have learned earlier,
03:56 so we continue to strengthen the surveillance system in case there is an increase or increased number of cases.
04:05 We are able to detect as early as we can, and therefore we are able to take action as early as we can.
04:16 So that is the situation. So thank you.
04:18 Thank you.
04:20 Thank you.
04:22 Thank you.
04:25 Thank you.
04:27 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Comments