News Roundup 22 December 2021
Dec 22, 2021 • 4 min Read
Pulse Asia: Marcos clear leader, Robredo steadily improving | PHILSTAR.COM – It’s firming up to be Sen. Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., Vice President Leni Robredo, and everyone else for the 2022 polls, with the former senator leading all candidates and the latter slowly improving, a survey by private pollster Pulse Asia suggests. In the results of its survey conducted from December 6 to 11, the think tank found that the son and namesake of the late dictator was the top candidate for the presidency, with 53% of respondents saying they would vote for him if elections were held then. On the other hand, Robredo’s 20% of respondents was a significant increase from the 8% in the previous Pulse Asia poll. Coming in tied for third place with 8% voter support each were Manila City Mayor Isko Moreno and Sen. Manny Pacquiao. Sen. Panfilo Lacson took the sole fourth spot with 6% of respondents saying they would vote for him if elections were held during the survey period. Retired general Antonio Parlade Jr. and labor leader Ka Leody de Guzman registered less than one percent of voter preference with 0.01% and 0.004%, respectively. Unlike in the most recent update, the earlier survey results in September still included presidential daughter Sara Duterte-Carpio, Sen. Grace Poe, and former House Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano as possible candidates for president. Surveys serve as a snapshot of public sentiment during the survey period. These can change over time but are useful guides for candidates and their campaign teams. Marcos’ lead on his rivals was clear across all regions and all social classes. In both Metro Manila and Mindanao, he took more than half of voters with 61% and 64%, respectively. With classes ABC, Marcos had 53% support versus Robredo’s 24%. It was the same story with classes D and E, where he and Robredo were 54%-19% and 49%-21%, respectively. This came despite the dominant headlines at the time the fieldwork for the survey was conducted: President Rodrigo Duterte’s accusation that an unnamed presidential candidate was a cocaine user, and the petitions for disqualification against Marcos. Despite being the clear runner-up, Robredo’s percentages across NCR (14% from 10%), Balance Luzon (24% from 8%), Visayas (25% from 10%), and Mindanao (10% from 4%) went up since the last survey in September. Across classes ABC (24% from 8%), D (19% from 8%), and E (21% from 11%), her popularity with voters also shot up significantly.
UK think tank: Marcos win in 2022 a ‘risk’ to PH recovery, investment | INQUIRER.NET – United Kingdom-based think tank Pantheon Macroeconomics considers a win of leading presidential aspirant Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. in the May 2022 elections as a risk to the Philippines’ economic and investment recovery from its pandemic-induced slump. “Elections in the Philippines are rarely fought on economic policy. But they still carry significant event risk, particularly if Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the current frontrunner and the son of an ex-dictator, wins. His father was toppled by the last major revolution, in 1986,” Pantheon Macroeconomics senior Asia economist Miguel Chanco said in a report. In particular, Chanco said next year’s national polls would keep investors on wait-and-see. It would not help that the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic would also temper consumer spending, Chanco added. “Consumption is likely to remain tepid, at best, as households continue to rebuild the massive savings lost since the pandemic started, a process set back markedly by Delta,” he said, referring to the more contagious COVID-19 strain which reverted parts of the country to the most stringent lockdowns last August. As such, unlike most other economic think tanks and financial institutions which forecasted the Philippines’ gross domestic product (GDP) to grow faster in 2022 than this year, Chanco said “the Philippines is the only economy [in emerging Asia] where we expect to see growth slow next year.”
DOH confirms 261 new COVID-19 infections | Manila Bulletin – The Philippines on Wednesday, Dec. 22, recorded 261 new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases, the Department of Health (DOH) said. Wednesday’s cases pushed the country’s running tally of COVID cases to 2,837,784, as shown in the DOH case bulletin. Of the total caseload, 0.3 percent or only 9,238 infections are still tagged as active or those who are still sick. The DOH said that 3,153 have mild symptoms, 3,400 have moderate symptoms, 1,801 are in severe condition, 507 are asymptomatic, and 377 are in critical state. There were also 122 additional deaths related to COVID-19, causing the death toll to increase to 50,916, which is 1.79 percent of all confirmed cases. Meanwhile, the total number of recoveries stood at 2,777,630 or 97.9 percent of the total case count after 395 new survivors were reported.
