Characterizing the Government’s Preventive Measure in Combating COVID-19 Pandemic in the Philippines: A Content Analysis

Abstract

By and large, COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented circumstance that impacted millions of people around the globe. This is a new strain of coronavirus that targets one’s lower respiratory tract and most likely to infect those who are immunosuppressed.  Thus, this qualitative paper answers the question, What characterizes the preventive measures of the government to combat COVID-19 in the Philippines? The research design employed was content analysis with news articles in three major dailies in the country as its corpora of data. From the cool and warm analyses of the field text, four measures emerged, labeled as ‘preventive nodes’ namely: communication node which refers to government’s way of disseminating the needed information and coming up with an alternative in saving the lives of many while vaccines are still on progress; accommodation node which pertains to supplementary efforts from the government in addressing health, social and economic concerns brought by COVID-19; assessment node which relates to the issues that have to be improved both of government and its people; and impact node which refers to government’s way of reporting the cases that may indicate the result of their measure. It was concluded that these nodes may promote a sense of awareness and provide knowledge to the public, alleviate financial constraints, hunger, and unemployment, come up with a better response and arrive at informed decisions in taking actions to impede this crisis.