Manila’s notorious traffic jams are back after Philippine authorities reopened public establishments at full capacity. Cinemas in Hanoi resumed operations after a nine-month closure. And in Singapore, more countries were added to the ‘Vaccinated Travel Lane’ scheme, which permits the entry of fully vaccinated travellers without quarantine.
But as the region begins to move past the pandemic, there are lessons to be learned from how countries responded to the pandemic. In many countries, the burden of transmission mitigation has been placed squarely on the shoulders of ordinary people. This has shifted focus — and primary accountability — away from governments.
The Philippines — which has suffered the worst Omicron surge in the region — is illustrative of this ‘individual responsibilisation’. For instance, a major element in the country’s pandemic response has been its emphasis on the use of personal protective equipment for the general public, at their own expense. This extended to mandates on the use of face shields — even outdoors — despite limited scientific evidence on their efficacy or practicality.
The haste with which this policy was adopted contrasts with the government’s reluctance to conduct mass testing and implement contact tracing. Its slow recognition of the airborne nature of COVID-19 also impeded larger-scale, systemic changes to improve ventilation in schools, workplaces and other public spaces.
Policies intended to limit transportation and mobility, especially at the start of the pandemic, likewise demanded compliance from individuals without accounting for varying needs that the government should have provided. For example, public transportation was suspended immediately in March 2020 without clear backup measures in place, stranding essential workers at their workplaces and forcing them to walk long distances to or from home.
Curfews were imposed with little warning, resulting in clashes between law enforcers and commuters held at checkpoints. Policies meant to uphold social distancing guidelines led to the indiscriminate arrests of motorcycle riders and — for a time — absurd, if not dangerous, plastic barriers between motorcycle drivers and passengers.
Social distancing measures have been largely performative. On one occasion, the Philippine Health Secretary was spotted at a market gauging the physical distance between individuals with a metre stick. Though quick to implement stay-at-home and physical distancing recommendations, the government failed to adequately create the conditions where this would be reasonable. It was slow to provide material and financial assistance, especially for low-income families who rely on daily wages for everyday subsistence. Some policies were counter productive, such as unnecessary checkpoints and restrictions to business operating hours that caused overcrowding.
None of this is new to the milieu that has long shaped the largely privatised health landscape of the Philippines, which makes individuals, not the state, responsible for their health. By encouraging the ethos of individual responsibility, the government set the stage for a securitised, disciplinary approach to the pandemic. People who fail to adhere to health protocols are labelled ‘pasaway’, heedless and disobedient.
The concept of ‘discipline’ — a decades-old populist trope that harks back to the Marcos dictatorship — has become an overarching theme in the Philippine COVID-19 narrative. At the same time, high-ranking officials, from senators to police chiefs, brazenly flout the rules they are supposed to implement without consequence. Two years into a pandemic that has spiralled out of control several times, the government’s law-and-order approach to the health crisis has only exposed its double standards when it comes to law enforcement.
Marginalised sectors of Philippine society have endured worsening state-sanctioned violence throughout the pandemic. Extrajudicial killings related to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs increased exponentially during the tightest lockdowns of 2020. The persecution of activists and human rights defenders continued, while indigenous populations are experiencing discrimination and harassment over their ongoing defence of ancestral territory.
This disproportionate effect of the pandemic on the marginalised is not unique to the Philippines. Similar outcomes are also documented in other countries in the region, even those that have had greater success at containing the pandemic or which have shown greater leadership.
People who use or inject illicit drugs have been at a particular disadvantage. Lockdowns throughout Vietnam and Indonesia severely hampered access to harm reduction services. In Thailand, police exploited local COVID-19 checkpoints to search and test people suspected of drug use. Prisoners have also been inordinately exposed to COVID-19, as overcrowded prisons in countries like Thailand and Myanmar struggled to keep the virus at bay even with decongestion efforts like early-release orders.
A Vietnamese rubber company took advantage of stay-at-home orders and destroyed several sacred sites that belonged to indigenous communities in Cambodia. Migrant workers in Singapore and Malaysia were met with harsh discrimination, on top of contending with more precarious work and living conditions.
The result has been that oppressive and discriminatory government actions against the most vulnerable have undermined state-instituted pandemic responses. In the Philippines, the costs of largely privatised testing and the militaristic approach to quarantine have made ordinary people, especially the poor, reluctant to seek medical care.
While vaccine hesitancy has posed a significant challenge to quelling the pandemic in the region, such hesitancy has stemmed partly from the governments’ failure to address people’s concerns about and beyond vaccination. These include fears of arrest among undocumented migrants and refugees living in Malaysia if they avail themselves of vaccines, rampant misinformation on social media in the Philippines and the religious and conflict-driven contexts behind hesitancy in Indonesia.
The ideal pandemic response is a public health approach that accounts for the structural and social determinants of health. Global and national governing bodies need to work hand in hand with all segments of the community to promote country-wide responses like immunisation campaigns and coordinated health information drives. Individuals can then play their part through measures such as masking and social distancing.
To truly ‘heal as one’ — as has been the mantra of the Philippine government — and better address future outbreaks, the government must be willing to take primary responsibility for pandemic responses and account for the broader sociocultural and structural factors that render populations safer (or more vulnerable) to health crises.
Gideon Lasco is Senior Lecturer at the University of the Philippines Diliman’s Department of Anthropology, Research Fellow at the Ateneo de Manila University’s Development Studies Program, and Honorary Fellow at Hong Kong University’s Centre for Criminology.
Vincen Gregory Yu is a physician and research associate at the Ateneo de Manila University’s Development Studies Program.
This article appears in the most recent edition of East Asia Forum Quarterly, ‘East Asia’s Economic Agreement’, Vol 14, No 1.