The Irony of Being Filipino in a world with COVID-19
Today, I read this article on COVID-19 and how it affects Filipinos in the diaspora, by Filipino-American Susan Araneta (she has a Masters degree in Public Health so she certainly knows what she is talking about). Access full article here: http://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/a-virus-among-us-filipinos-and-covid-19
In her introduction, she writes about the first COVID-19 vaccine administered in the United Kingdom (UK), given by nurse May Parsons – one of thousands of Filipinos in the National Healthcare Service.* She follows this with sobering statistics pointing to how disproportionately Filipinos are affected in California and the rest of the United States of America (USA), because the Filipino-trained nurses “disproportionately more likely to work in Intensive Care Units, Emergency Departments, and long-term care facilities, like nursing homes, compared with white, US-trained nurses, thereby exacerbating their exposure to COVID-19.”
In my first semester in this Master of Culture, Health and Medicine degree, I took an introductory class on the Anthropology of Migration (formal name: Crossing Borders: Migration, Identity and Livelihood). I had a conversation with lecturer Dr. Ashley Carruthers in which he remarked “In this class, we refer to the Philippines as an emotional superpower”. Yup, sounds about right. Filipinos take care of the world – nurses and other medical/healthcare personnel, domestic helpers, cruise ship crew. While I don’t fully agree with the word “emotional” (My relatives have suggested “empathetic” and “compassionate” as better words, instead of “emotional”), one can’t deny the fact that there are a lot of Filipinos in the healthcare industry worldwide. Similarly, Filipinos are also part of the reproductive labor force (domestic work, cleaning, cooking, child care) internationally. Being a largely Roman Catholic country due to 300+ years of Spanish colonization, the Filipino diaspora (especially that for labor migration) has spun a narrative of being missionaries to the world, like in this article here.
Anyway – my point here is: Filipinos abroad are administering the long-awaited COVID-19 vaccine to the citizens of rich countries like the UK and USA. These countries are first in line for the vaccines because of their resources: they have adequate financial support for vaccine development and robust-enough health systems for distribution. Being frontliners in the fight against COVID-19, the Filipinos that work in these health systems will benefit from the early vaccination as well. All well and good, but I can’t help but contrast that with the Filipinos in the Philippines which may be one of the last populations to be adequately vaccinated (sheer number of people, plus challenges of distributing the vaccine in an archipelago); the country from which these healthcare workers come from still remains vulnerable. Ironic that Filipinos administer the vaccine to others internationally, but cannot have the same situation at home.
Note:
* Interesting note regarding media coverage. The international media focuses on the vaccine being administered (see CNN example here), while the Filipino angle focuses on the nurse administering the vaccine (Philippine Star).
References:
Araneta, Susan. “A Virus Among Us: Filipinos and COVID-19 – Positively Filipino: Online Magazine for Filipinos in the Diaspora.” Positively Filipino Online Magazine for Filipinos in the Diaspora, December 16, 2020. http://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/a-virus-among-us-filipinos-and-covid-19.
“Reproductive Labor”. Wikipedia. Accessed December 17, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproductive_labor
Digal, Santosh. “Filipino Diaspora: Modern-day Missionaries of the World”. Omnis Terra. December 17, 2020. http://omnisterra.fides.org/articles/view/85
