Now it can be told, lockdowns were a waste

For our special presentation on our talk show “Straight from the Sky”, for the first time on our show we bring to you a millennial political leader who was a two-term congressman of Cebu’s 1st District comprising of Talisay City, Minglanilla, Naga City, San Fernando, Carcar City, and Sibonga. He is currently a first-term mayor, Talisay City Mayor Gerald Anthony “Samsam” Gullas. Of course, he has a great mentor in the person of former Cebu governor and congressman and first city mayor of Talisay City, Rep. Eduardo “Eddiegul” Gullas and his uncle Sir Jose “Dodong” Gullas.

If there is anything I learned from this first interview with Mayor Samsam Gullas, it is that he has huge shoes to fill, and being a millennial, he can best represent Talisay City. Perhaps what I find most important with Mayor Samsam, it was when he told me that as congressman in the 1st District for two terms, he learned from the three cities and municipalities of his district and would not be ashamed to copy any of the best practices that the other mayors have done. I call this his humility, something that few politicians can ever learn.

So watch this very informative and interesting interview with Mayor Samsam Gullas on SkyCable’s channel 53 at 8 p.m. with replays on Wednesday and Saturday same time and channel. We also have replays on MyTV’s channel 30 at 9 p.m. Monday and at 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. on Wednesday and Friday.

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Allow me to report what I believe is good news for the Philippines when The Philippine STAR reported in its front page that the Philippine Navy’s very first missile-capable warship arrived in Subic, Zambales, on Saturday after a five-day maiden voyage from Ulsan, South Korea. This is perhaps the most capable Navy ship that can take on the most modern warships lurking in the South China Sea.

As the news report said, once it is officially commissioned to service, the Philippine Navy said in a statement issued Saturday evening, the FF-150 is set to be formally named BRP Jose Rizal. The commissioning ceremony is slated on June 19, the birthday of the ship’s namesake. While the ship is anchored, its sailing crew is also set to undergo a two-week quarantine in adherence to health protocols implemented by the health department to alleviate the spread of the novel coronavirus.

As reported many times in the past by US newspapers, the Philippine Navy is represented by that old and decrepit World War II landing ship to confront with the bully People Liberation Army (PLA) of China. Not anymore!

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In a news report from I & I, which has become viral in social media, entitled, “There’s more evidence that lockdowns were a massive waste of time and money!” This is something that people are just learning after three months doing a lockdown. So allow me to reprint a portion of this article for you to read, as the mainstream media did not print this.

“The nation’s economy is on track to drop by more than 30% in the second quarter. Unemployment is well into the double digits. Half of small businesses might close in the next six months. All for naught, it would appear, giving the growing pile of evidence that the economic lockdowns didn’t work.

“The latest evidence comes from a report out of JP Morgan Chase & Co. this week. It finds that there’s been no increase in cases or deaths as other nations and U.S. states start reopening.

“This flies directly in the face of all the public health expert predictions of a major spike once people started moving about. “Virtually everywhere, infection rates have declined after reopening, even after allowing for an appropriate measurement lag,” says the report’s author, Marko Kolanovic, a quantitative strategist at JPMorgan. “This means that the pandemic and COVID-19 likely have (their) own dynamics unrelated to often inconsistent lockdown measures that were being implemented.”

“Another research paper released in early May, this one by Thomas A. J. Meunier of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, found that the lockdowns in western Europe had no evident impact on the epidemic.

“Comparing the trajectory of the epidemic before and after the lockdown, we find no evidence of any discontinuity in the growth rate, doubling time, and reproduction number trends,” Meunier says.”