By Art Jimenez (Concluding Part) Last week’s column ended with the more important question: “How does IATF decide if an LGU is heading towards New Normal or backsliding to MECQ, for example? What COVID-19-related criteria does it use?” Fearing I might only lose time waiting for a DOH-IATF reply, I decided to look for
November 11, 2020
By Art Jimenez Blame game. Were it not for the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19), the term “community quarantine” would not have entered our vocabulary and tweaked our collective psyche. In an attempt to limit the spread of COVID-19 in the country, President Duterte on March 12, 2020 placed the National Capital Region on a partial quarantine
November 4, 2020
By Art Jimenez Starting January 2021 and unless Mayor Jerry Treñas changes his mind, Iloilo City will operate on nearly the same 2020 P2.7 billion budget. Citing “uncertainties,” the mayor told The Daily Guardian, “The budget will remain at the same level as last year because we don’t know what will happen. We saw
October 28, 2020
By Art Jimenez At long last, Free Again! After 218 days cooped up at their homes teenagers of voting age can now join their seniors outside the residence and enjoy life! Allowing the youngsters and their friends and classmates to shake their legs lest they atrophy has helped raise the number of mall visitors,
October 21, 2020
By Art Jimenez Caution. This column is about professional tennis and addressed to tennis players, enthusiasts, and fans. Or to anyone who wants to know some champion lady players and their kind of sport. Recent events in professional tennis prompted me to look closer into the sport and formulated a theory that should have
October 14, 2020
By Art Jimenez Due to the vigilance and incessant complaints from Metro Manila commuters and the timely response of the DoTr and LTFRB, the “No Card, No Ride” policy it imposed in favor of AF Payments, Inc. on EDSA buses has been suspended starting October 5. It was just four days after the scheme
October 7, 2020
By Art Jimenez Finally, the local business sector has taken notice that the city (and for that matter, the entire country) is regularly going around in quarantine circles – actually since mid-March – to their collective detriment. In my past columns, I described this occurrence as “quarantine roulette.” We don’t know where the ball
September 30, 2020
By Art Jimenez A week ago on 16 September, the European Parliament (EP) passed Resolution “2020/2782(RSP) on the situation in the Philippines, including the case of Maria Ressa” with a vote of 626 in favor, 7 against, and 52 abstentions. The Resolution was predicated with 20 Whereas clauses and enumerated a menu of to-do
September 23, 2020
By Art Jimenez First it was Bayanihan Act to HEAL as One enacted on March 24, 2020. Then followed Bayanihan Act to RECOVER as One on September 11. The latter presupposes positive strides have been achieved towards fighting and weakening the pandemic in the last five months and two weeks and that recovery will
September 16, 2020
By Art Jimenez Last week, we rounded off the number of Iloilo City residents who are free to leave their residences anytime outside curfew hours to 240,000 or nearly half of our city’s 2015-census population of 447,992. The difference represents the age ranges from “Under 1 – 20” and 60 – and above” who
September 9, 2020
By Art Jimenez The quarantine roulette wheel has turned to Modified General Community Quarantine for Iloilo City and the rest of Western Visayas, except Bacolod, effective September 1 to 15. We sort of graduated from being aligned under GCQ (sans the descriptive “Modified”) in the last fortnight with other southern cities that are chockful of
September 2, 2020
By Art Jimenez COVID-19 quite abruptly put a halt to our country’s continued quarterly economic growth in the first half of this year when the economy hiccupped with a -0.7% GDP contraction in Q1 followed by a stinging shrinkage of -16.5 percent in Q2. The consecutive negative quarterly GDP growth technically puts us in
August 26, 2020