The Economist - USA (2021-02-20)

32 Asia The Economist February 20th 2021

Lockdown in the Philippines

Suffer the little children

O

felia abo has not left home for 11

months. In the mornings the six-year-

old attends school online. The rest of the

time she eats lots of snacks, plays Uno with

her mother or, when it isn’t raining, runs

around on the roof of her building. She

doesn’t mind: “I can play all day.” Then

again, she admits, “I sometimes get bored.”

If she were allowed, she would like to go to

a mall or the beach.

Ofelia and the 32m other Filipinos un-

der the age of 15 (a third of the population)

are “required to remain in their residences

at all times” as part of the government’s ef-

forts to curb the spread of covid-19. Even as

quarantine restrictions have been loos-

ened for working-age adults, they have re-

mained in place for the youngest and ol-

dest members of society, who are deemed

most vulnerable. “She tells me how much

she wants to go out,” says Ofelia’s mother,

Iris, who asked that she and her daughter

not be identified by their real names. All

the same, Iris considers the rules “OKand

reasonable”, since the disease remains

such a risk. Known new infections, having

peaked at more than 4,000 a day in August,

are still running at around 1,600 a day, de-

spite limited testing.

The Philippines is not unique in keep-

ing children at home. Spain did the same

thing for several weeks at the start of the

pandemic. But it is an outlier in keeping

them confined for this long. “Everyone ac-

cepts that it could result in poor psycho-

social effects on children,” says Bernadette

Madrid of the Child Protection Unit at the

University of the Philippines. But she,

along with many paediatricians, psychia-

trists, epidemiologists, public-health spe-

cialists and parents, believes that the bene-

fits of keeping children at home outweigh

the risks, in part owing to the nature of Fil-

ipino households.

It is rare for children to suffer serious

cases of covid-19. But they can still catch

the virus and transmit it to others. That is a

problem given the preponderance of mul-

ti-generational households in the Philip-

pines. Less than a tenth of elderly Filipinos

live alone. And more than 10% of people ol-

der than 60 live with their grandchildren

but not their children, who are often work-

ing elsewhere.

As a result, the loudest opposition to

the lockdown of children comes not from

outraged parents, but from businesses. Ci-

ties in the Philippines, and especially Ma-

nila, the capital, are not over-endowed

with parks and playgrounds. For many

families, shopping malls are the closest

thing to a public space. Banning kids from

malls means adults visit less often too,

dragging down consumer spending. gdp

contracted by 9.5% last year, the worst of

any large South-East Asian country.

For the most part, Filipinos gripe about

the haphazard rulemaking rather than the

rules themselves. A senator complains that

cock-fighting pits have been allowed to op-

erate again even as schools remain closed.

Others think the blanket lockdown should

be replaced with local restrictions deter-

mined by the case rate in each area. The

workings of the Inter-Agency Task Force

for the Management of Emerging Infec-

tious Diseases, the country’s covid-19 re-

sponse unit, are opaque. In January it said

it would allow children aged ten and older

to go to shopping malls. President Rodrigo

Duterte abruptly reversed the decision.

The u-turn had “nothing to do with incom-

petence, not at all”, he explained. 

MANILA

Filipino kids have been confined to their homes for almost a year

Red alert: a child on the loose

The coup in Myanmar

General strike

Y

angon hasits share of traffic jams, but

the congestion on February 17th was

unusually bad. At busy intersections

across the commercial capital, cars were

parked with their bonnets raised, as if they

had broken down. By late morning the city

was paralysed. Yet few seemed to mind.

When the police tried to shunt some vehi-

cles to the side, residents of houses lining

the road rushed out to stop them. The

gridlock was intentional. Activists protest-

ing against a military coup on February 1st

were attempting to prevent troops from

entering the city and civil servants from

going to work. Many government employ-

ees were shirking anyway. 

For almost two weeks, tens of thou-

sands of Burmese, and sometimes hun-

dreds of thousands, have taken to the

streets to protest against the coup. But it is

a subtler form of protest that is causing the

generals the most grief. Thousands of pub-

lic-sector workers, from at least 245 dis-

tricts and 21 ministries, are on strike, ac-

cording to Kim Jolliffe, an analyst. Govern-

ment offices are deserted. So too are class-

rooms. Many public hospitals have in

effect shut. Those that have not are so un-

derstaffed they are turning new patients

away. “Operations at many government de-

partments all but halted this week,” report-

ed the Irrawaddy, a news website, on Feb-

ruary 16th. 

The banking system is also seizing up.

Online banking remains possible, at least

when the army allows the internet to oper-

ate, but most branches are closed. Reports

suggest lending has dried up and most ad-

ministrative work has stopped. “A dysfunc-

tional financial sector would definitely

hurt the regime,” says Ko Ko (not his real

SINGAPORE

As civil servants take to the streets,

government is grinding to a halt