The Palace this week announced that plastic face shields are now mandatory outside homes although it isn't quite clear how mandatory.
The Department of Health acknowledged Friday that the face shields, previously only required in malls and restaurants, are not for everyone.
They aren't recommended for people who have trouble breathing because of respiratory conditions, for example. Nor for those who need to see with their eyes.
Although the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have little to say about face shields — only that they are no substitute for face masks — Health Secretary Francisco Duque III stressed that the decision to require them even outdoors is backed by science [citation needed].
Maybe the science behind it is that face shields — and the fogged up glasses, breathing difficulties, and migraines they bring — will make it too inconvenient for people to go out.
The task force may yet change its mind about the requirement or just quietly forget about it and pretend it never happened.
The government stopped insisting on motorcycle barriers after Interior Secretary Eduardo Año contracted COVID-19 shortly after demonstrating them but not before people were forced to buy the plastic shields despite objections from riders and from engineers.
READ:Whatever happened to: Anti-COVID motorcycle barriers
In the meantime, Pasig City has said it will not require face shields for people commuting on bicycles because of safety concerns. Everyone else everywhere else will have to comply for now.
While policies against the coronavirus seem to change by the week, there is at least the excuse that the science around it has been changing.
The same cannot be said about how those policies have been implemented and how government officials who tell us to follow the rules are quick to excuse each other from those same policies.
Salvador Panelo, the president's lawyer, was caught on video singing at a restaurant despite a sensible call to ban videoke for everyone else. Asked about it, he dismissed the incident as "fake news", a term now mostly used by government officials in an effort to deflect criticism.
"Wrong. There is a social distancing of one meter. And I'm wearing a face shield. Also, I was requested to sing by the guests coursed through the owner, and the guests came to my table and thanked me," Inquirer.net quotes him as saying.
He added he had recently tested negative for COVID-19 anyway.
The claim of social distancing is debatable — the video shows him sitting beside a man who was eating — and none of the other things he mentioned, like guests thanking him for singing, excuse what he did.
But that is the way that it has been since March for high-profile officials. Panelo is already chief presidential legal adviser, so there is no risk of him being promoted like PNP chief Debold Sinas was despite breaking quarantine protocol for his birthday.
There is also little likelihood that Panelo will ever be made to account for his singing in public or for doing it so badly.
Aside from a vague statement from the Department of the Interior and Local Government about how officials should lead by example, there has been nothing more about quarantine violations by presidential spokesperson Harry Roque or Sen. Manny Pacquiao.
Pacquiao, in fact, held another gathering — a birthday party this time — and Roque has regained enough confidence to use a member of his staff as a model in a PSA for wearing face shields.
The member of his staff, he says in one of the most awkward moments in government TV, would model for Victoria's Secret afterwards.
These are little things, of course. Small violations that would only be irritating in normal times. But these are not those times. These irritants are happening while COVID-19 restrictions even in countries considered are raising concerns about freedoms and people's daily lives.
According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in Sweden, 61% of countries have imposed policies "violated democratic standards because they were either disproportionate, illegal, indefinite or unnecessary in relation to the health threat."
READ: Freedom, another casualty of COVID-19 pandemic
The US Atlantic Council and Italian ISPI is quoted in an AFP report as saying poor government response in the Middle East "and the strengthening of authoritarian practices 'is most likely to amplify dynamics and reasons for discontent.'"
This, they said, "will transform the coronavirus crisis 'from a health crisis into an economic and political one.'"
Sociologist Mario Mayuga warned early in the quarantine that "fear and the naked threat of the powers-that-be have become the norm" and that "the solution to the crisis became securitized, rather than socialized—a recipe for disaster in a country where inequality is becoming a historical norm."
As he also pointed out, the lockdown has highlighted inequality in the Philippines in case we haven’t noticed it already.
"We have seen the privileges of the few during the crisis, abuse of power and the insensitivities to the plight of the masses. The normal that we heavily criticized as sociologists are now being replaced by a ‘new normal,’ which neither new, nor normal, nor equitable," he said in June, when people were more willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt.
That may not be as true six months later, with more of the burden — of preventing the spread of COVID-19 and of keeping the economy going — now squarely on the shoulders of the public and with officials mixing sports metaphors while bickering about vaccine supply deals.
We will note grand gestures and bombastic statements from the government but will remember more the daily adjustments and changes that we have had to make this year and that those in power were given a free pass for.