It’s 44 days after the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the country and day one of the Duterte administration’s community quarantine-cum-lockdown of Metro Manila. There is much more anxiety, fear and panic than there should be.

The coronavirus threat is real and it’s critical for the government to respond quickly and decisively. Everyone also has a responsibility to support every measure to stop the spread of the virus.

But what if the government’s response is muddled and, worse, ill-conceived? Do we, as the president said, “just follow” because it’s for our own good? Follow, and keep silent?

There are fortunately more than enough Filipinos who are neither blindly adoring of Pres. Duterte nor crave subjugation. Speaking up from outside government and especially within it, they are the best chance to get the Duterte administration to reconsider its militarist approach to addressing the COVID-19 pandemic.

And there should be no doubt that the response is certainly militarist.

When the president addressed the nation on March 12 he was flanked by uniformed military officials rather than, for instance, health and social welfare officials. Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) chief of staff General Felimon Santos Jr was on his left and Philippine Army chief Lieutenant General Gilbert Gapay to his right. Earlier today, NCR Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Brigadier General Debold Sinas for some reason felt compelled to put on his combat fatigues when he faced the media.

Looking beyond the rambling delivery, the president’s announcement was straightforward – the headline measure to address the pandemic is a militarist population control measure. The AFP and PNP will flex their armed might to contain and control some 16 million Filipinos living or otherwise working in the National Capital Region (NCR). “Just follow.”

The spectacle was an example of cognitive bias in full play. The Duterte administration’s authoritarian and militarist mindset is well-established – in how it approached the problem of illegal drug abuse, in its defeatist approach to China’s incursions into Philippine territory, and in its hawkish approach to peace talks with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP). Cobbling together the most militarized government, and Cabinet, in the country’s history only made this worse.

This has predisposed the Duterte government to a militarist approach to problems – COVID-19 being just the latest nail for its militarist hammer. Other public health and economic measures weren’t given the emphasis they deserved.

There was nothing about vastly improving COVID-19 surveillance and contact tracing. The very least the president could have done was acknowledge the horribly mis-timed halving of the Department of Health’s (DOH) Epidemiology and Surveillance Program budget from Php262.9 million in 2019 to Php115.5 million in 2020.

More than that, even if so belatedly, he could have announced massive free testing towards getting a real grasp of the situation. This would have been the most sensible starting point for contact tracing and managing the problem – that is, for action based on facts rather than mindlessly and simplistically thinking that force and militarist measures are magic bullets.

There was nothing about assuring suspected and, especially, confirmed COVID-19 cases of free care and treatment. He could have started by acknowledging the likewise horribly mis-timed budget cuts in the DOH’s Health Systems Strengthening Program from Php25.9 billion to Php19.3 billion. No one is assured that there are enough properly equipped public health and quarantine facilities.

He could also have admitted that hospital bed capacity per capita in the country has been falling and hospital care more expensive over the decades of health privatization in the 1990s. With more private beds than government beds in the country today because of this, he has a ready justification for declaring that private hospitals will be mobilized to combat COVID-19 regardless of any complaints that their profit-seeking will be disrupted. NCR has the biggest concentration of private hospitals in the country.

There was nothing about educating the broader public further about simple but effective measures they can take to help stem the spread of the virus. The presidency is a powerful platform to convince people about things they can do to contribute to the solution. Yet, the government seems to think that social distancing is a matter of enforced control rather than education.

There was nothing about assuring the vast millions of workers, informal sector earners, and small entrepreneurs that the government will support them in this time of grave economic disruption. The pandemic will have far-reaching consequences on people’s livelihoods especially of low-income groups and particularly with the community quarantine of NCR.

The president could have said that he will take the side of workers over employers and ensure that they will have continued pay and incomes. In NCR alone, businesses can afford to be helpful to their workers with at least Php1.2 trillion in combined profits just in 2017. All we have heard from the labor department is that they will “urge” employers to be understanding and flexible.

The president could also have said that hundreds of thousands of NCR jeepney and tricycle drivers, street and market vendors, carinderia and sari-sari store owners, and other urban poor would be protected and kept healthy. The social welfare department has only been able to refer to its existing assistance programs which are woefully underfunded as it is even before the pandemic. The ‘community quarantine’ will likely push at least hundreds of thousands into even deeper poverty.

There was also nothing about how to protect the nearly 200,000 inmates packed into the most overcrowded incarceration system in the world, made even more bloated by the so-called war on drugs. The overcrowding makes them incredibly vulnerable with the many sick and elderly within having it worst.

Of course none of this is to write-off community quarantines on principle. It’s more that a range of measures are needed to combat COVID-19 and the apparently narrow-minded militarism of the Duterte administration is getting in the way of necessary and proportionate attention to these other measures. Harsh measures aren’t necessarily effective measures.

If the correct package of measures isn’t taken then it’s possible that the virus will just spread even more. Tens of thousands of frontline health responders working heroically will only become even more overwhelmed, and millions of Filipinos will be unnecessarily at serious risk.

Which is why public exhortations to “just follow” and actually just following are so dangerous.

Unfortunately, this is the kind of governance that the administration has been pushing in the 1,354 days since Pres. Duterte took his oath of office as the 16th president of the Philippines. The capital and the country are where we are today because of a trajectory that started that fateful day at the Rizal Ceremonial Hall of the Malacañang Palace.