MANILA (PHILIPPINES DAILY INQUIRER/ANN): Vice-presidential candidate and Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio (AP pic below) yesterday said the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) should give pensions to senior citizens in the country.
“We need to talk to the DSWD and make them understand that we need to go back to the old pension system, so that all our senior citizens are given assistance from the DSWD,” said Duterte-Carpio in a statement during her campaign sortie in Zambales.
According to her, giving seniors pensions was also a problem in Davao City, just like in other local government units, as pensions provided by DSWD sometimes did not arrive.
She explained that Davao City, for its part, even passed an ordinance to provide its senior residents fair pension benefits as it cannot overrule a national law.
“What we did temporarily in Davao City was to create a local pension system.
“We made an ordinance that gives priority to all senior citizens and gives them pension, 65 years old and above but in the next few years it will those below 60 years old,” she said.
Meanwhile, the Covid-19 cases in the country are getting under control as cases are falling by the day.
The Philippines’ Department of Health (DOH) reported 1,923 new COVID-19 infections on Saturday, pushing the number of confirmed cases in the Southeast Asian country to 3,650,748.
The DOH said 198 more people died from COVID-19 complications, bringing the country’s death toll to 55,607. The number of active cases dipped to 62,533 as the country’s positivity rate dropped further to 7.9 per cent.
Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said that only seven areas across the country are at “moderate” COVID-19 and hospital admission risks, while the rest of the country are all under alert level 2 on a scale of 5.
Metro Manila, the epicentre since the outbreak two years ago, is under alert level 2 until the end of the month.
The Philippines has seen four waves of COVID-19 infections since 2020. The country reported the highest single-day tally on January 15 this year, with 39,004 new cases. The Philippines, which has some 110 million population, has tested over 26 million people.
