QUEZON CITY, 19 February 2020 – Deputy Speaker and Lone District of Antique Representative Loren Legarda highlighted the possible connection between unsustainable use of wildlife for food and the COVID-19 in her privilege speech on Monday, 17 February.
The COVID-19, or the coronavirus disease 2019, a new strain of coronavirus first identified in Wuhan, Hubei, China in December last year, has infected more than 49,000 people in 28 countries and territories around the world and has claimed the lives of more than a thousand people, including a Chinese national who died here in Manila.
We are living our days in fear of even casual contact with each other. Events have been canceled, travel plans changed, the public’s attention consumed by a threat that the world has just woken up to: the 2019 novel coronavirus (nCoV) — a new strain of coronavirus first identified in Wuhan, Hubei, China in December last year. The latest news reports indicated that the World Health Organization (WHO) has already given this virus an official name: COVID-19.
Deputy Speaker and Lone District of Antique Representative Loren Legarda today said that the Philippines’ ranking in the Global Climate Risk Index 2020[1] released by the Germanwatch organization, further reveals the country’s vulnerability to the impacts of climate change and underscores the need to accelerate and strengthen adaptation measures, especially at the community level.
Legarda said that the report analyzes the extent countries have been affected by impacts of weather-related events, such as storms, floods, and heatwaves, for the year 2018 and for a twenty-year period from 1999 to 2018.
Deputy Speaker and Antique Congresswoman Loren Legarda today expressed alarm over the new strain of Coronavirus that has caused an outbreak in Wuhan City, Hubei, China and has rapidly spread to other countries, with suspected cases already being monitored in the Philippines.
“Despite the assurance from the Department of Health (DOH) that the Philippines has no confirmed cases of Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), we cannot let our guard down especially after increasing confirmed cases have been reported in other areas such as Hongkong and Taiwan, and countries like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and even in the United States and France. We cannot afford to be complacent notwithstanding the assurances issued by experts,” Legarda said.
A Philippine delegation, led by Usec Blesila Lantayona of the Department of Trade and Industry, is now in Berlin, Germany for a 5-day training on intrapreneurship and competitiveness.
