Senator Imee Marcos on Friday, Oct. 29 said it is time to live with the COVID-19 virus.
This as Marcos, chairwoman of the Senate Economic Affairs committee, prodded the government to stop resorting to lockdowns as a default measure in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic and instead improve testing capacity to detect cases of infection early and isolate them immediately.
“Living with the virus should be our goal than achieving a zero-COVID target. Lockdowns are reactive, not proactive,” she explained.
Marcos said that the 2022 budget must finance the country’s testing capacity to prevent the “blanket disruption in livelihood, income generation, and overall economic growth.”
The senator from Ilocos Norte credited the government for lowering the pandemic’s reproduction rate since the August lockdown but added that unless testing capacity is improved to guard the gains that have been made, the country would be stuck in a constant rehash of alert levels and quarantine protocols.
The COVID-19 reproduction rate in the country, which reached a high of 2.04 in March 2020, has gone down this year from a high of 1.32 percent last March to 0.52 percent this week.
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