MANILA, Philippines (Updated 3:10 p.m.) — Malacañang announced Wednesday that the government’s pandemic task force has recommended to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to make mask wearing voluntary in outdoor settings, a proposal that has secured the chief executive’s “verbal approval.”
While Marcos is said to have given his go ahead for the proposal in a call with Interior Secretary Benhur Abalos, Press Secretary Trixie Cruz-Angeles said this is still not a policy.
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Department of Health officer-in-charge Maria Rosario Vergeire also said the recommendation has to be formalized in an executive order.
“This has to be placed in this kind of legal instrument before it becomes a policy. What we are doing right now is initially informing the public,” Vergeire said in a news briefing.
Angeles said the Inter-agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases has recommended to “liberalize mask wearing mandate and make mask wearing outdoors voluntary across the country.”
“This will be optional in open spaces or non-crowded outdoor areas with good ventilation, provided that senior citizens and those immunocompromised individuals are highly encouraged to continue wearing masks,” Angeles said partly in Filipino.
It is still not clear which areas would be considered as open spaces, although Vergeire said these include parks. She added that this would be up to local governments to determine based on guidelines that the national government will release.
Vergeire said the IATF’s decision to recommend the lifting of the outdoor mask mandate is anchored on government officials’ “confidence … in our vaccines,” which she credited for making the number of COVID-19 cases “stable and manageable.”
Angeles added that a pilot test of the total lifting of the mask mandate may happen towards the last quarter of the year, as long as there is an improvement in the country’s uptake of COVID-19 boosters.
Vergeire said they are still studying the threshold of the booster uptake to trigger the pilot implementation of the lifting the requirement to wear masks indoors. She added that this will first be implemented in select areas to see if the healthcare system would be able to handle this.
Just last week, the Department of Health which is part of the IATF, said it was still too soon to abandon the mask mandate following Cebu City’s order making masking optional outdoors.
“Wearing a mask is just a small sacrifice to protect ourselves. When we protect ourselves, we can also protect our family members,” Vergeire said then.