Opposition should deliver a comprehensive counter-SONA

The lingering and crippling Covid-19 malignancy was acknowledged by President Duterte in his last State of the Nation Address (SONA), via an off-script threat to impose fresh lockdowns in face of reportedly surging infections from the Delta variant. With the health tools and infrastructure underachieving, with the Covid leadership clearly clueless and second-guessing most of the time on strategies and with the fiscal tools nearly exhausted with nothing concrete to show for the expenditures, the nation is literally staring at the abyss and our leader has run out of policy options. Mr. Duterte, with a manifest perfunctory attention to issues outside of his favored drug war and war on the Left (plus his little regard for science), has one default position on fighting a pandemic that refuses to go away - "lockdowns," a word which even has a forceful, martial ring to it.

Never mind that the longest and one of the most stringent lockdowns in the world - ours - has been an epic fail. The Bloomberg tracker said we are the second-worst country in the world to be in during this Covid season, which means failures across the board with nary a bright spot or a sliver of hope. With the exception, of course, of our heroic, underpaid and overburdened health workers.