By Leonardo Micua

 

THERE are persistent calls from the business sector for the IATF to downgrade the quarantine classification of Metro Manila and its surrounding areas to Alert Level 1, from Alert Level 2 due to the fast dwindling COVID-19 cases there.

If that happens, isn’t it just logical that Metro Manila should now open its doors to provincial buses that are limited to just dropping off their passengers midway at either Tarlac City and Angeles City and transfer to other buses to reach Metro Manila? This has been the result of the unacceptable terms of the LTFRB forcing the buses to load and unload passengers only at the North Luzon Expressway Terminal in Bocaue, Bulacan.

With the situation normalizing in Metro Manila, the national IATF also lost its reason for not allowing provincial buses arriving and departing Metro Manila to use their respective terminals in Cubao, Pasay and Manila to load and unload passengers.

In the early days of the pandemic, IATF passed Resolution 101 banning provincial buses in traversing EDSA to minimize overcrowding of commuter buses in the streets of the national capital and people crowding various terminals that will increase rate of transmissibility of  COVID-19.

That resolution has lost its justifications for it and should, therefore, be withdrawn.

To date, only Five Star was allowed to commute passengers from Dagupan to Cubao and vice versa starting last January 22 on a charter basis. But the bus company can only commute passengers to Cubao four times a day on a Point-to-Point arrangement and on controlled capacity with no bus allowed to pick up or disembark passengers along the way.

Other bus companies are still weighing the pros and cons whether to take the risk since as they may be merely operating at a loss knowing they cannot take as many passengers like they used to, because only a P2P arrangement and only few trips will be allowed.

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From where we sat before our deadline, we saw that there will be no war over Ukraine, neither is the war is going to erupt soon. Fresh dispatches from both Ukraine and Russia by international wire services indicated that tension was averted for a while when leaders and topnotch diplomats scrambled to mediate the conflict before it could turn into a fire, a full-blown fire.

Convulsions were felt around the world when Russia massed more than 100,000 soldiers near its border with Ukraine and in Russia’s close ally Belarus during the last few days, awaiting the signal from President Vladimir Putin to fire the first shot and roll into Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. 

As much as 97,000 Ukrainian soldiers are prepared to fight to the last man in order to repel the invasion into their homeland. At the same time, troops of the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance sympathetic to Ukraine, had been deployed in Romania, Poland and Lithuania and ready to cross the border should Ukraine be attacked.

It’ll be an all-out war in Europe again if that happens, which will certainly be a prelude to World War 3. War is a matter never to be toyed about, especially because some of the countries that would be involved in the face-off are nuclear armed. 

Cooler heads prevailed for now but for how long? We hope Ukraine and Russia bring their loggerheads to the conference table for Europe and the world to attain permanent peace.

You may think the Philippines is far enough from Europe to be drawn into the conflict. Wrong. Each of the nations in Asia and the Far East is aligned with the West represented by US and the East by Russia, whose biggest ally in Asia is China, and North Korea.

Think also that any bigger convulsions in the Middle East will disrupt the flow of oil to non-oil producing countries, like the Philippines, which may be forced no other way to go back to the basics in order to survive. 

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