Senator Nancy Binay on Sunday called on the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) to reconsider the lifting of facility-based quarantine for fully-vaccinated travelers until a comprehensice and localized surveillance system is in place.
Without the medical safeguards, effective contact tracing and monitoring in place, Binay warned aa COVID-19 surge could still happen and derail the country's full recovery from the pandemic.
The senator noted the Philippines is still struggling in controlling the spread of community infections as far as Delta and Omicron variants are concerned.
"Other countries are also experiencing waves of surges, and it goes without saying that relaxing border control will definitely contribute to the rise in new variants and subvariants--not to mention the probability of severe illnesses and deaths," Binay said in a statement.
"Sometimes, it makes me think if the IATF's decision is based on tria and error So, are we supposed to draw comfort from this? Is the lifting of restrictions supposed to slow down the high transmissibility rate of new variants or, in any way, be less threatening to Covid infections?" she pointed out.
Earlier, the IATF suspended the "green-yellow-red list" system which is supposed to classify countries, territories and jurisdictions based on their COVID-19 risk levels.
The lifting of facility-based quarantine is now uniform for fully-vaccinated travelers regardless of the country of origin.
Effective February 1, fully-vaccinated travelers will be required to present a negative RT-PCR test taken within 48 hours prior to departure from the country of origin.
Binay said such policy could trigger another spike in the number of COVID cases.
"I'm not sure if the intent is to stop the spread or government has already given up on us. The spikes will definitely be inevitable," Binay pointed out.
"It doesn't make sense that after two years since the time two Chinese travelers were confirmed to be coronavirus carriers, we are again considering relaxing border controls while averaging 20,000 cases per day," she said.
"It's hard to accept that we are now giving up. Maybe, yes, it doesn't make sense anymore--when we need people in government making decisions which make sense," the senator noted.
"Mistakes in policy decisions are both economically disruptive, and unnecessarily damaging. I'm hoping we've learned something in the past two years," she said.
"The bottomline is (we need) to learn to live with the virus and get back to as much of a normal society as possible--but not without medical safeguards, otherwise we are bordering on irresponsibility," Binay said.