Palace hopes Filipinos’ quality of life to improve with impending availability of COVID-19 vaccines

November 5, 2020

Malacanang expressed hope on Thursday that the lives of the Filipinos will improve from now on as the vaccines for coronavirus disease are expected to be available soon.

Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque made the statement following a survey by the Social Weather Stations, showing four out of five adult Filipinos have said their quality of life worsened in the past 12 months.

"We are saddened by that, but that is because of the pandemic," he said in a televised press briefing in Catanduanes province.

"But in my view from now on, our lives will improve. The vaccines will come out," Roque said.

He added that Filipinos have been learned to live amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a national mobile phone survey conducted on September 17-20, SWS found that 82 percent of adult Filipinos said their quality of life got worse as against 11 percent who said it was the same, and only six percent said it got better.

"The September 2020 score joins SWS’s worst trends in survey history, having recorded -78 in May and -72 in July during the COVID-19 crisis. The only other time the score reached catastrophic level was in June 2008 (-50), during rice and oil price hikes," SWS said. Celerina Monte/DMS