Applause and non-applause

The applause. The Freeman, in its issue last Sunday, quoted Cebu City Edgardo Labella his observation on the country’s management of the COVID 19 crisis. It was significant to note that the news report came one day before the scheduled State of the Nation Address. The mayor said that President Rodrigo Duterte is efficiently handling the pandemic. There should be some reason for making such pronouncement which I do not want to conjecture negatively. Rather, let me opine that it is good to hear Mayor Labella assuring us that the national government is doing good health service to the nation, of course, in collaboration with the great efforts of the city government. I like to label Labella’s act as “applause.”

I was hoping though to read some details of the measures taken by Duterte as basis of the mayor’s applause aside from whatever were publicized. There must be such factors but perhaps the mayor was occupied by more substantive matters that he missed to cite them. Consequently, this paper reported none, unfortunately.

In my mind, it is important that the absent desirable facts should be known. These should be revealed if only to be fair more to the mayor (so that he may not be misunderstood) than the president. Having said that, I thought of reading the COVID 19 records coming from other countries. I found out that the Philippines is doing better than neighboring Indonesia in addressing this crisis. Our neighbor has, in rounded figures, (1) a population of 260 million, (2) over 100,000 COVID 19 cases and (3) 5,000 deaths. There are only about 110 million Filipinos, 80,000 cases and 2,000 deaths. Whatever the Duterte administration is doing in the face of the coronavirus, we cannot miss the figures demonstrating how effective Philippines has, thus far, succeeded, comparatively speaking.

The numbers registered in other countries show another picture. Malaysia has a population of 32 million and it has 9,000 cases. There are 70 million Thailanders and only 3,000 cases. Of the 97 million Vietnamese, only 500 of them had been affected by the virus. I am incompetent to analyze these figures but I see that we are doing badly on the comparison chart.

The non-applause. In the SONA of President Duterte, he revealed the information that he called President Xi Jin Ping, of the People’s Republic of China, four days earlier. That he could make a call to the Chinese leader just that easily, I assume, showed his friendship to the Chinese leader! Duterte told his SONA audience that he asked some kind of a special favor. Anticipating that China can develop a vaccine against the virus soon, Duterte requested Xi Jin Ping to put the Philippines ahead of others countries in the list of prospective buyers. To dramatize his announcement, Duterte even said that our purchase should be made part of our supposed credit line. It was a show-off. I like to imagine that Duterte expected the loudest applause from his audience. Unfortunately, it did not happen. The crowd did not clap their hands. Figuratively speaking, President Duterte fell flat on his face. It could probably the biggest NON-APPLAUSE, he ever received. It led me to ask, why?