EDITORIAL - Tragedy in a food bank

Actress Angel Locsin has long been involved in humanitarian work, but this time her good intentions went tragically awry. Inspired by the rapid spread of community pantries across the country, Locsin decided to organize her own last Friday, by way of celebrating her 36th birthday.

Locsin is no budding actress; she is an entertainment star with many followers on social media, where she announced her latest project a day ahead. It was apparently seen by her fans and those truly in dire need of food banks in this crisis as a birthday party of sorts, with the celebrity expected to bring so much more food than what has been seen so far in the other community pantries.

This expectation is manifested in the massive crowd that showed up at Locsin’s birthday food bank in Barangay Holy Spirit in Quezon City. Images show that physical distancing all but disappeared. The jostling for a share of the food proved too much for Rolando dela Cruz, 67. The elderly man fainted while waiting in line to get his food, and was pronounced dead on arrival in a hospital.

Health and local government officials are now scrambling to conduct random testing among those in the packed crowd, which is feared to be a super spreader event amid an ongoing killer COVID surge in Metro Manila and neighboring provinces. City and barangay officials say Locsin coordinated with them only belatedly, when it became clear that the crowd could quickly become unmanageable.

The Department of the Interior and Local Government has since urged organizers of community pantries to coordinate with local government and police personnel, not to secure a permit, but mainly to ensure that COVID health protocols are maintained in the food banks that have been widely praised for showcasing the Filipino bayanihan spirit in this terrible crisis.

Red-tagging of the original food bank organizer, Ana Patricia Non, by the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict has made other organizers wary of government authorities. But the chaos in Locsin’s birthday event, for which she has apologized and lamented the death of Dela Cruz, shows the merit in coordinating any activity that might draw a large crowd in this public health emergency. Even a single COVID-infected person in that crowd could lead to more deaths.