MANILA, Philippines — President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) to investigate local community officials involved in illegal cockfighting events and drinking sessions despite the Luzon-wide enhanced community quarantine.

(These LGUs, I’d like the DILG to investigate who are behind the illegal derby and drinking binge.)

The President said local officials found guilty of involvement in these banned activities during the strict quarantine should not expect help from him.

“For those people who are identified by the barangay captains and the mayors who are violating the quarantine: Pasensya ho kayo. Help would not (come),” he said.

The government earlier announced it will enforce stricter implementation of the lockdown measures after it observed an increased number of violators and vehicles plying along Edsa and major thoroughfares in Metro Manila.

According to the Philippine National Police (PNP), 108,088 have so far violated the lockdown rules as of Monday, April 13.

Duterte placed the entire Luzon, home to about half the country’s total population, under a month-long enhanced community quarantine to curtail the further spread of COVID-19. The quarantine was extended until April 30.

The measure stopped all public transportation, banned mass gatherings, and strictly enforced home quarantine as work for the majority of the region’s residents was suspended. People are only allowed to go out for provision of food and other basic necessities and in cases of emergency.

On Black Saturday, GMA-7 newscaster Arnold Clavio exploded a bombshell when he posted information he said he got about a hospital where dead bodies were piling up in the hallways due to a lack of body bags, and the hospital staff had been allegedly ordered to stop the tally of COVID-19 deaths. Following swift public furor, Health Secretary Francisco Duque III immediately denied there was any instruction for hospitals to stop counting fatalities from the outbreak, and the East Avenue Medical Center eventually admitted it was the facility in question. However, the bodies were not in the hospital hallway, it said, but in the morgue hallway. Per a CNN Philippines interview with the hospital spokesperson, as of 4 p.m. Saturday, “6 bodies remain uncollected in the morgue.”

It’s likely that, because of the public uproar that prodded health authorities to spring to action in a matter of hours, the hospital’s appeal for more protective equipment for its personnel, as well as body bags and a mobile freezer to augment its morgue facility, would be addressed soon.

The situation at the country’s largest facility for mental health patients came to light when its chief administrative officer Clarita Avila disclosed that, as of April 5, 34 of the NCMH staff were positive for COVID-19, 28 of them doctors and nurses. In addition, 297 of its employees became PUIs or patients under investigation while 181 were PUMs or patients under monitoring. Of the center’s 83 psychiatrists, 50 were under self-quarantine. Three patients had also died of the disease.

Already, 30 percent of NCMH’s more than 1,000 nursing staff no longer report for work as they are either PUIs or PUMs, or are simply afraid to go to work for lack of personal protective equipment, said Avila. Appealing for help, she noted that the facility only had 100 pieces left from 586 PPEs, all of them from private donors. That appalling situation should have roused Duque et al. to address the matter pronto. Instead, the response to Avila’s appeal was a gag order.

In a letter posted on the hospital’s Facebook page, NCMH head Dr. Roland Cortez told Avila to stand down: “This is to inform you that you are not the spokesperson of NCMH, you are not a member of the NCMH COVID-19 committee and not even a member of the expanded management committee of the hospital.” Avila was ordered to “refrain from issuing statements about COVID-19 because this function is under DOH Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire.’’

But if reports are submitted to higher-ups every day, the situation under Cortez’s watch has apparently gone unresolved—or been kept under wraps—such that, on top of Avila having to turn whistleblower with her disclosures, an “open letter’’ from a health care worker in the NCMH backed up her claims with more damning details. The letter lamented, among others, the failure by hospital management to provide protective equipment and food to its frontliners, and that Cortez allegedly refused to implement skeletal workforce arrangements until the situation turned for the worse.

The situation at the NCMH is dead-serious, and demands utmost transparency and decisive action from health authorities to contain the spread of COVID-19 among a particularly vulnerable set of people. But how does gagging Avila protect the interest of the NCMH patients, or its workers? That desperate frontliners have to resort to airing their sentiments anonymously can only speak of the dysfunctional state of affairs at the facility. A doctor even had to appeal to Vice President Leni Robredo to include the NMCH in the routes serviced by vehicles for health care workers.

Even before the pandemic, there have been reports about the dilapidated facilities and insufficient budget for the 90-year-old NCMH, the country’s main center for mental health care services catering to an average of 3,000 daily inpatients and 56,000 outpatients a year.

Now, the facility appears to be in even more dire straits, with crude rank-pulling and the suppression of information complicating its own fight against COVID-19. How ironic that the NCMH’s 24/7 crisis hotline slogan does not seem to apply to its own staff, who have to signal for outside help. The slogan? “Tara, Usap Tayo! (Come, let’s talk!)”

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National Center for Mental Health chief denies cover-ups on COVID-19 cases