How the Omicron variant affected a media study in the Philippines

On January 3, 2022, the National Capital Region (NCR) in the Philippines was put under alert level 3 because of the surge of the Omicron variant. NCR is a region in Luzon that is composed of 17 local government units (LGU) with over 13-million population (Philippine Statistics Authority, 2021). The Omicron, first discovered in South Africa in November 2021, is known to be more contagious than the other COVID-19 variants but has less severe effects (Sohn, 2022). From 500 cases on December 25, 2021, the cases significantly jumped to 4600 by January 2, 2022 (Dancel, 2022). Being under alert level 3 resulted in limited travel within and outside the region. Activities such as face-to-face classes, sports, and recreational activities in bars and casinos were prohibited. Indoor and outdoor capacity for restaurants and cinemas was limited from 30% to 60% occupancy. The same restrictions applied to social gatherings such as funeral services (Galvez, 2021). The alert level 3 was initially set until January 15 but extended until January 31, 2022. Other regions in the country, such as the Cordillera Administrative Region, Central Luzon, Region 5, and some parts of the Visayas and the Mindanao regions, followed the protocol a few weeks after (F. M. Cervantes, 2022). The surge had a widespread effect on people as many pharmacies were observed to have long queues of customers in line to buy paracetamol and flu medicines. To make matters worse, many of them had shortages of stocks because of the extremely high demand. The Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Association of the Philippines and the local doctors were aware of the problem explaining that the sudden surge of COVID-19 cases and the increasing number of people getting flu-like sickness every day prompted people to panic buy (Dela Pena, 2022). Adding to the problem was the detection of the BA.1 and BA.2 Omicron subvariants in the country by the end of January (Tomacruz, 2022). There was an influx of cases in the last two weeks of January in the Luzon region as 87 Omicron cases were recorded (Department of Health, 2022), while major cities in Central Luzon suffered high rates of COVID-19 cases. These areas include Bataan (3206 cases), Tarlac (1013), Pampanga (4285), and Angeles (1592) (D. Cervantes, 2022). Not including NCR, Luzon has an approximate population of 48 million (Philippine Statistics Authority, 2022).