WITH or without the continued lockdown – enhanced community quarantine – in Metro Manila and the whole of Luzon, Congress will resume its session on Monday, May 4. Under the Constitution, it is to meet until 30 days before the opening of the next regular session on the fourth Monday of July.
Both the House of Representatives and the Senate will have to revise their seating arrangements if they are to comply with the call for social distancing during the ongoing lockdown. That should be easy for the 24-member Senate, but more difficult for the 304-member House.
Or the House may opt to hold online sessions, Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano said. The last time the House met to approve Republic Act 11469, the Bayanihan to Heal as One Act, granting President Duterte special powers to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, only a few members were actually present on the House floor, with most of them participating online.
Congress needs to act on additional measures needed by the executive to fight COVID-19 in the country. The Department of Health (DoH), in particular, needs P5.2 billion to hire 17,757 healthcare workers. The DoH submitted the budget proposal to the Department of Budget and Management last April 15.
Right now, 743 doctors, nurses, and other health workers are deployed in various hospitals, including the Dr. Jose N. Rodriguez Hospital and Sanitarium, the Lung Center of the Philippines, the Philippine General Hospital, and the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine. These are among the 693 government and private hospitals which now have 8,714 beds for COVID-19 patients.
But additional testing and quarantine facilities are needed at six major international airports in the country, and to equip public health laboratories and isolation rooms in 70 DoH and 85 provincial hospitals, and provide 450 isolation tents, ambulances, personal protective equipment, test kits, diagnostic and life-support equipment.
In the ongoing effort against COVID-19, over 700 doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers have already been infected. Their numbers will now be supplemented by the 17,757 healthcare workers the DoH now seeks to hire with the proposed P5.2-billion budget bill which Congress is expected to act on when it resumes its sessions on Monday, May 4.
