MANILA: The Philippines permitted measures on Saturday (Dec 26) to decrease the spread of recent, more infectious coronavirus variants, as President Rodrigo Duterte warned of a second lockdown should case spike before the nation gets its first vaccines in May.
Nations around the globe have in recent days closed their borders to flights from the UK and South Africa, the place where infectious variants have been detected.
Duterte extended an existing ban on flights from Britain by two weeks to mid-January and mentioned the Philippines would impose travel curbs on nations with area people transmission of the UK variant.
With 469,000 infections and 9,067 deaths, the Philippines has the second-highest COVID-19 cases, next to Indonesia in Southeast Asia.
Neither the UK nor the South African variant has been detected there yet,
In an emergency meeting with health consultants and government officers, Duterte also ordered a 14-day quarantine for passengers who’ve come from or transited by Britain, and from nations and territories where the more infectious COVID-19 variant first recognized there was detected, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and Japan.
Duterte pledged free vaccines for the nation’s 108 million individuals, with shipments and inoculation to begin in May.
“If (within the meantime) severity in numbers would demand that we take corrective measures instantly, then we should simply have to return to lockdown,” he mentioned.
In mid-March, the Philippines imposed one of many world’s longest and hardest coronavirus lockdowns, which relaxed in June to restart growth in the economy.
The Philippines is in talks to acquire around 80 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines, together with from Pfizer, Moderna, and Britain’s AstraZeneca, as well as Johnson & Johnson, India’s Novavax, China’s Sinovac, and Russia’s Gamaleya Institute.
