Funding for the country’s Covid-19 response has breached $19.6 billion (about P979 billion), according to Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez 3rd.”The Covid-19 bonds, loans and grants are a total of $19.6 billion disbursed over a two-year period,” Dominguez said during the continuation of the House Committee on Appropriations’ deliberations for the P5.02-trillion 2022 national budget last Thursday.Of this, $11 billion came from global bonds, $7.7 billion from program loans, $200 million from previously contracted funding, $26 million from project financing and $637 million from other loans.Dominguez said the government has also raised $1.126 billion from multilateral financing to buy 105.65 million vaccine doses.The government has signed deals for 15.5 million doses for $176.5 million drawn from the national budget.The country has received a total of 48.8 million donated doses, he said.Dominguez said 194.89 million doses are expected to arrive this year, 24.9 million doses of which were purchased by private companies.”This is good enough to vaccinate 100.5 million Filipinos,” he said.As of August 24, the country has received 48.5 million doses, with 31.1 million shots administered. Dominguez 17.8 million jabs were for the first dose and 13.3 million for the second dose.The Department of Budget and Management (DBM) has reported that public funding allocated to state agencies for pandemic response amounted to over P679 billion as of end-June.The government is allocating P395.6 billion of the proposed 2022 budget for Covid-19 response.Dominguez gave the same figures during a taped meeting with President Rodrigo Duterte,He assured the President that the government will have “no problem” in financing the acquisition of vaccines.In a related development, because of the spike in Covid-19 cases, the One Hospital Command (OHC) Center is being swamped with calls from people looking for vacant beds for Covid patients.The country’s treatment czar, Health Undersecretary Leopoldo Vega, said the center has been receiving an average of 530 calls a day, up from 110 to 120 daily calls last July.Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire described the stream of calls to the OHC as “overflowing.”Vergeire said from August 15 to 21, the center received 2,145 referral calls.Vergeire has urged local government units to improve their triage and navigation system for Covid-19 patients and call the OHC only as a last resort.As of August 24, 59 out of 443 government hospitals had not increased their Covid-19 bed capacity to 30 percent, while 220 out of 843 private hospitals are below the mandated 20-percent bed allocation.WITH CATHERINE S. VALENTE AND RED MENDOZA
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