Two cents, preceded by two facts:

1. The Province of Dinagat Islands remains one of the seven provinces in the Philippines with zero confirmed cases of COVID-19.

2. This would not have been possible, and cannot be sustained, without the efforts of our Doctors to the Barrios.

Public health measures are imperative to handling a pandemic. Especially in rural areas with few health workers, no diagnostic capabilities, and limited health facilities. Especially due to the increase of COVID-19 cases in rural areas from the Hatid Probinsya program.

How are we supposed to convince local governments to invest in public health and health human resource development if the national Department of Health chooses to focus on hospital-based care at the expense of public health?

How are already poorly-equipped rural communities supposed to handle and contain the pandemic if the health workers deployed there are pulled out to work in private hospitals? Does anyone actually think that there are communities safe from COVID-19, who don't need their doctors?

Is it fair to the residents of the geographically-isolated communities these DTTBs are assigned to, that their health concerns come second to those of their urban counterparts?

Is it fair to deprive an isolated municipality of, say, one of its two doctors, because hospitals either can't or won't hire their own?

The presence of COVID-19 does not magically make other health system problems disappear, and, as has been made obvious, the existing health system problems exacerbate the COVID-19 problem.

But apparently it's too much effort to actually think of long-term solutions to short-term problems, so let's pretend we haven't been mistreating and underpaying our health workers and ignoring community and social medicine for decades, 1/2

shuffle the DTTBs around to make the governments paying for years of neglect with their citizens' lives happy, and call it a day. 2/2