MANILA, Philippines — Senator Nancy Binay on Sunday slammed the Department of Health (DOH) for its pronouncement that it is too early to conclude that COVID-9-infected Chinese tourists, who visited the country this year, helped spread the virus.
“Seryoso?! So, ‘di pala sa turistang Chinese galing ang Covid sa Pilipinas. But would the DOH be willing to explain to us kung sino ang nagdala at kung paano nakalusot ang Covid sa atin?” Binay said in a statement.
(Is this serious? So the spread of COVID-19 in the country did not start with the Chinese tourists? But would the DOH be willing to explain who brought the virus and how the virus spread?)
Binay said the DOH showed its failure in contact tracing for its inability to show evidence that Chinese tourists had spread the virus.
“By saying na ‘di sapat ang ebidensya na galing sa Chinese tourists’ ang Covid (that there’s not enough evidence showing that the virus came from Chinese tourists) is practically admitting that they are a failure in contact tracing–which explains why they failed to stem the spread of the virus–and continue to be so,” the senator said.
In a previous online press conference, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said it is still too early to determine an accurate conclusion on how the COVID-19 infection had spread.
This despite the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) study showing that the coronavirus strain that circulated in the Philippines is different from what the three Chinese tourists contracted.
To recall, the first three COVID-19 cases in the Philippines were all Chinese tourists who were from Wuhan City, China’s Hubei province, where the causative agent of COVID-19 originated.
In January, Binay, who chairs the Senate committee on tourism, called on the DOH and other government agencies to prohibit Chinese tourists from entering the country as a precautionary measure for COVID-19 outbreak.