More news about how the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines is being handled by the public and the government.
There's a new COVID variant in town. The DOH says there is nothing to fear.
The Department of Health (DOH) has allayed fears over the new COVID-19 variant XEC that is causing a spike in cases of the affliction in Germany.
Health Assistant Secretary and spokesman Albert Domingo said there is no spike in COVID-19 cases nationwide and the XEC variant has not been detected in the country at this time.
“We can assure (the public) that there is nothing to fear,” Domingo said yesterday in a radio interview.
Domingo, however, said it is also possible that the variant has already entered the country, but it is not causing a spike in COVID-19 cases.
The new XEC variant, he said, was discovered in Germany in August and has evolved from the JN.1 variant. It now comprises 13 percent of all COVID-19 cases there.
Domingo added that experts have not seen evidence that XEC can cause severe infection.
He also said that cases of influenza-like illness nationwide remain low.
Flu symptoms, he added, are common nowadays because of the cold weather.
Domingo said that one can opt to voluntarily use a face mask as a preventive measure.
But be sure to wear your face mask. If you want to.
During the pandemic the number of Filipinos marrying foreigners dropped. Now the numbers are back up.
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| https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1234150 |
The number of Filipinos abroad who married or have become partners of foreign nationals has continued to rise, the Commission on Overseas Filipinos (CFO) said on Wednesday.
While the data has been high since 2007, the number significantly dropped in 2020 because of the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic, CFO Secretary Leo Arugay said in a statement on Wednesday.
However, the number started to pick up again in 2022 as the CFO recorded 6,854 marriages or partnerships with foreign nationals.
This translates to a 40.1 percent increase from the 4,891 “intermarriages” recorded in 2021.
Records also showed that the majority of them married to a US citizen at 2,808, followed by Australians at 555, Canadians at 396, Germans at 335, and Japanese at 307.
Most Filipinos who entered into “intermarriage” met their partners through personal introductions, workplaces, penpal referrals made by relatives, the internet, and ads and columns.
Of the 6,854, the CFO data showed that 663 are male and 6,191 are female, and most of them came from the National Capital Region (NCR), followed by Calabarzon or Region 4-A, Central Luzon, and Central Visayas.
The majority of these marriages were to Americans which ties into this next story. The number of Filipinos applying for visas has reached pre-pandemic levels.
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| https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1234216 |
Applicants processing their US visas would only take less than 10 minutes to finish the first two steps in their application once the new US Embassy Visa Application Center (VAC) opens on Saturday.
The VAC at the Parqal Building in Parañaque City will handle the collection of photo, fingerprints and documents of a visa applicant before the interview at the US Embassy on Roxas Boulevard.
With its opening, applicants who will book from Sept. 28 onward would have to secure two appointment slots — one for the VAC and another for the interview.
“This is one way that will make our consular operations a little bit more efficient and because of more efficiency we’ll be able to further meet ever-growing consular demands here in the Philippines,” US Embassy Consular Section Visa Chief Rob Romanowski said in an interview on Thursday.
The US Embassy in Manila has processed more than 300,000 non-immigrant visas in 2023, breaching the pre-pandemic figure of 206,000.
Romanowski said the embassy expects this number to further grow this year.
Yes, everyone who can wants to flee this nation.
A recent talk was held about how the pandemic was handled, whether the pandemic has ended, and whether a similar crisis could be handled better.
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| https://www.manilatimes.net/2024/09/26/campus-press/conversations-on-another-pandemic-still-relevant/1974219 |
IT has been over four years since the Philippines was placed under quarantine in 2020.
Signs of Covid-19 in the country today are minimal enough that some consider the virus' impact now completely negligible.
So, can it be said that Covid-19 has really "ended" once and for all?
Dr. Fidel Fernandez, current associate dean for student affairs at Ateneo de Zamboanga School of Medicine, a former professor of pathology at SEGi University in Malaysia and a former doctor of infectious disease with 40 years of experience, shared his insights about the virus in an interview, reflecting on the pandemic in retrospect.
When asked if the Philippines was unique in how it handled the pandemic, he mentioned how the lockdown experience was different in Malaysia, where he taught as a professor of pathology and felt that the social distancing was much more flexible.
In the Philippines, Fernandez said there was a lack of medical expert decision-makers to enforce appropriate Covid-19 precautions, expressing his view that containment of the virus was "not according to how I perceive what could have been done."
"How the pandemic was presented to people... it was too much," he commented, adding that the virus' preventive policies were enforced "forcefully and militarily."
Malaysia's lockdown situation, he explained, still allowed people a routine to live by, even with masks and restrictions for big establishments.
At the height of the pandemic, "It was just like a normal day; they did not prevent people from going to the office except for when there was a confirmed positive case there."
The medical doctor and professor recalled a period in the Philippines when barriers were placed between motorcycle drivers and passengers as a Covid-19 precautionary measure.
On highways, increased wind resistance from the barrier would make chances of an accident much more likely even at moderate speeds, although continually moving through open air on the road had been a valid reason enough to rule out the risk of infection.
Fear was a big reason why the management of the pandemic went in a direction that, at times, caused Filipinos unnecessary and overwhelming stress.
There needed clarity and calm transparency regarding the virus from health authorities, but the doctor said, "From the very beginning of the pandemic, several principles of medicine, especially infectious diseases and microbiology, were bypassed. A lot was shortcut, a lot was abbreviated, a lot was missed out."
This was true for countries over the globe, he said, remarking that proper sequencing of Covid-19 should have established a golden standard of the virus' genome well before mutations grew out of control.
There is an air of mystery surrounding the emergence of the pandemic, the doctor said, with an attitude of skepticism regarding the accuracy of the original virus' record.
Despite the chaos and hardship of the quarantine, however, the Philippines endured, and today, Covid-19 is endemic.
"We are so fortunate that [for] a lot of the mutations that have taken place, the outcome is that the virus became more tame," he said.
Nonetheless, he warned that the chances of more outbreaks due to a mutation that proliferates a virulent form of the infectious disease are low, but not zero.
Whether another global health crisis could be better dealt with remains to be further questioned.
This conversation is still relevant today, with the media giving a voice to anyone who wants one and making misplaced panic easier to relay than ever.
Looking back at such an uncertain and frightening era, Fernandez emphasized the need to be wary of dependence on authorities who are not experts in the medical field and not act rashly during health crises.
It is important to remember that as viruses mutate, an understanding of truth and health care is necessary for better or worse.
The challenge the infectious disease expert gave was to seek truth proactively and not be led by the instinct of fear without stopping at any point to think critically.
Covid-19 exists now as an endemic disease, usually causing common cold-like symptoms, but also as a memory of a time when Filipino people moved forward with resilience, living on in the minds of those who stay curious about how the country's health care and government can improve.
Of course it's all a lot of talk. No mention of how the whole COVID-19 scenario was gamed out two months before it even happened (see Event 201). And no mention of how similar scenarios are also being gamed out this very moment. So this talk is pretty worthless in some respects.
Before the pandemic Japan Airlines intended to hire dozens of Philippine flight attendants. Now that project is being revived.
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| https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Work/JAL-begins-hiring-flight-attendants-in-the-Philippines |
Japan Airlines has begun recruiting dozens of flight attendants in the Philippines with the help of a local staffing agency, rebooting a program that was postponed during the coronavirus pandemic as it responds to growing demand for travel to Japan.
Through JAL's partnership with TDG Human Resource Management, a group of new flight attendants hired in the country is scheduled to join the company in January 2025. It will continue to recruit in the Philippines, where English is widely spoken, every year.
TDG will cooperate in the selection process and provide Japanese language education and customer service training. After receiving final training in Japan, the flight attendants will work on JAL's routes between Manila and Tokyo, as well as on other international routes.
JAL partnered with TDG in 2019 to recruit 40 flight attendants, who were scheduled to begin their final training in Japan in 2020, but plans were postponed due to the pandemic. JAL has previously recruited flight attendants in Bangkok, Singapore and Taipei.
It's another project that ostensibly could have been brought back sooner.
