The chief of the Philippine National Police (PNP) ordered his officers to “strictly enforce” a ban on outdoor exercise in the Philippine national capital, Manila, on Wednesday while the city remains under lockdown to limit transmission of the Chinese coronavirus.
“The prohibition on outdoor activities is the decision of our Metro Manila mayors, and it needs to be enforced by your PNP for the welfare of all,” PNP Chief Guillermo Eleazar said in a statement issued August 10.
Eleazar ordered local PNP commanders in Metro Manila “to disperse information about this rule through Oplan Bandillo,” according to the local news site Coconuts Manila. “Oplan Bandillo” is “a community awareness and information dissemination program” by which “local police forces use megaphones and speaker systems during their regular beat patrol to communicate with people in the community,” according to Philippine News Agency.
The Metropolitan Manila Development Authority passed a resolution on August 9 prohibiting outdoor exercise across the capital “to ensure the safety of the people in Metro Manila for the next two weeks.” The ban supported wider restrictions on movement across the metropolis as part of Manila’s latest “Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ),” which launched on August 6 and will last through August 20. An ECQ is the strictest form of coronavirus lockdown in the Philippines.
“[T]he latest round of hard lockdowns remains rigid: only select people are allowed to leave their homes, capacity of public transport vehicles is reduced, and border control measures are tightened, among others,” Philippine news site Rappler reported of the capital’s latest ECQ on August 10.
Metro Manila is home to 13.5 million residents and was the world’s most densely populated city proper in 2019.
Manila’s latest ECQ order and outdoor exercise ban — designed to curb a high infection rate of the Chinese coronavirus across the capital — runs counter to the advice of health experts, who say that “transmission of the Covid-19 [Chinese corona]virus is massively reduced by being outdoors,” Coconuts Manila noted on Wednesday. The news outlet cited a recent World Health Organization (W.H.O.) public service announcement detailing ways to prevent and reduce transmission of the Chinese coronavirus.
“It is really important to maintain good air circulation or airflow, which includes meeting outdoors,” Dr. Oliver Morgan, the director of the W.H.O.’s Health Emergency Information and Risk Assessment Department, said in the video.
“On the other hand, when we meet indoors, it can increase the risk of transmission if there is not good air circulation,” he added.
Dr. Morgan advised people to avoid “confined places that have poor air circulation” to reduce coronavirus transmission.
“We recommend that when people do meet, they try and meet outdoors wherever possible,” he stated.