By Joel B. Belinan
The past two or three weeks, we noted a couple of developments in sports that reflect how governments have been handling this pandemic. First, the nearest to home big event, the One Championship in Matrix held in Singapore where the country’s MMA face Eduard “the Lanslide” Folayang competed last October 30, 2020. No I am not going to add to all those so called keyboard warriors bashing or defending Folayang. I am more into the significance of the event being held in a country that was once the epicenters of Covid-19 in South East Asia. The MMA event was a declaration to the world by Singapore that they have learned how to live with Covid-19.
We have to take note that before last Friday’s One Championship event in the Singapore Stadium, Asia’s biggest media organization have been doing their events either in Bangkok, Thailand or in its immediate neighboring countries whose Covid- 19 infection were surprisingly very low. Look at the statistics, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos recorded very low cases of infection. And these countries were vulnerable due to their common border with China. They are not rich countries in the level of those in the European Union nor could they be compared to Asia’s Tiger Economies (Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Singapore). These countries are just like our country.
The other big sports events are those that were held in the United States, in Las Vegas Nevada in particular, in the UFC- bubble where Khabib Nurmagomedov, the Russian MMA phenom, beat Justin Gaethje and then immediately announced his retirement from the sport last October 24. Another one wais the boxing event where the Russian boxer, Vasiliy Lomachenko, was beaten by Teofimo lopez Jr. that led to the World Light weight Championship Unification bout in the MGM Grand last October 17. Again these two events say a lot, especially with the United States still in the lead of Covid 19 infections in the global village. Actually events like this had started even a few months earlier in the US with the National Basketball Association being one of those that first showed to the whole world that, yes, sports can co-exist with Covid-19.
In our home front the national government did give the Philippine Basketball Association the permit for its bubble in Clark field Pampanga. That would have been a very good statement of sorts for the Philippines but then government’s action or in-action shows how inconsistent the current leaders are. Let’s cite some funny moves by the national government. The national government recently announced that Filipinos are now allowed to travel abroad even for non-essential reasons starting November 1, 2020 but do not allow foreign tourists to enter the country. Remember, the Philippines is now the top Covid-19 country in South East Asia and, if am not mistaken, and in the top 20 all over the world. What’s in the mind of the Inter-Agency Task-Force (IATF) against emerging infectious diseases when they made such policy and then the President readily approved it? It would have been better if they allowed Filipinos to travel abroad but also allowed foreigners in. We don’t know yet if there would be takers which is interesting to watch out for in few more weeks.
In the local front, Baguio since October 22 was opened to all travelers from the whole of Luzon. This is an upgrade from the first allowed areas that is region 1. The funny thing was, the process was very inconvenient. And by the looks of the experiment with region 1, very few tourists actually came in to brave the visa-like application system. The consolation is, maybe the local government and the Tourism Regional Office have learned a thing or two. The funny thing again here is that while the reported number of tourists that came in were very few, local residents observed several non-Baguio, or even BLISTT residents roaming around freely. A report had it that a van full of people dressed obviously in “non-Baguio type” of clothing tried to enter Mines View Park but when the guard asked for their official tour guide and their permits, the group could not show any and just left. Apparently they might have entered the city using other means that Filipinos are known for, like fake documents.
The country and majority of us, its people, have been on our knees for several months already. God knows how we survived this crisis. We have been hoping to see some decisive decision from our national leaders instead of their usual infamous grandstanding or tantrums and threats. If Vietnam and Thailand leaders were able to make things possible for them to co-exist with Covid-19 why can’t our leaders do the same? What did they do which we can learn from? A skeptical fellow said, well their presidents or prime ministers are not the best in the solar system, unlike ours. Kidding aside, we are not saying that we should just abandon everything that we have been doing and go for a free for all system. What we have been waiting for is for our leaders to look at how we could learn from our neighboring countries. For example, in South Korea they are very good in contact tracing and they prevented the spread of the virus. And as my friend, Master Sung Am Cha, said, they never had a hard lockdown.
Japan has almost the same situation with South Korea and both countries are known for their governments’ financial support to their citizens. Taiwan, of course, is considered the first country to have been able to control Covid-19 due to their no non-sense leadership’s decisive actions from as early as he last week of December. Defenders of the government will surely argue that the three countries are rich but again, a country’s decisiveness and right decision making does not come from its being rich or poor. Thailand and Vietnam are like us, remember? The thing with the Philippines is that our health authorities and our national political leaders seemed to be too obedient to the World Health Organization (WHO) organization. A friend of mine who is the assistant captain of a cruise ship that got stranded in Singapore during the first two months of the hard lock-down was surprised that medicines being used in other countries for Covid19 patients are prohibited here. We don’t really know the veracity of this claim but if we are to evaluate this on how these countries are doing it would seem that the claim is true. Singapore has controlled Covid-19, and not the other way around. Indonesian Covid-19 cases vis-à-vis their population which is almost three times more than ours, is actually in a better situation. It can be recalled that the DOH rejected the Japanese Avigan medicine, but Indonesia used it to combat the disease. We don’t have enough space to enumerate all such circumstances.
On tourism, I have been wondering why the government would not consider opening up the country to people from countries with very minimal cases like the Tiger Economies of Asia (Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Singapore) and from other similarly situated countries like New Zealand and Australia. Furthermore, we should open up to our South East Asian neighbors specially Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Brunei, among others. Will they come considering our high Covid-19 cases?
Oh its going down, DOH, says of our Covid-19 cases, so we should still prohibit tourists from the US, India, Rusia, Brazil, South Africa (the top Covid-19 countries world-wide) and the big countries in Europe that are now averaging more than 15,000 cases daily (a second wave), so they say.**
