to

Manila would be around 10:30 p.m. because … it would take an hour, an hour and a half to get to their destination or to leave the Philippine airspace, whether they are going westbound to Vietnam or eastbound going to the Pacific,” Co said.

In the morning, the MIAA anticipates that the first arrival of inbound flights would be around 7 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. since the airspace would open by 6 a.m.

MIAA General Manager Cesar Chiong, in the same briefing, said they would urge the airlines to notify all passengers about the possible rescheduling of flights “because if the passengers are advised, I don’t think there’s going to be a problem.”

Meanwhile, House Deputy Minority Leader France Castro said the public could not be blamed if they would suspect that the May 1 power interruption at NAIA 3 was done on purpose to hasten the airport’s privatization.

“The P100-billion unsolicited proposal to rehabilitate the Naia was just recently announced, then we have this power outage. We cannot fault the public for thinking that this was intentional to hasten the sale and privatization of the Naia even if the public was not consulted—yet they will be the ones to shoulder the cost,” she said on Tuesday.

—with a report from Julie M. Aurelio n

(By Jane Bautista/Inquirer.net)

bring back mask mandate...

Vergeire emphasized the uptick does not translate to more hospital admissions, severe and critical cases, and deaths. Healthcare utilization rates also remain low.

“We cannot have that kind of low tolerance that when cases increase, we suddenly have a knee-jerk reaction to bring back masking or impose lockdowns. We cannot do these back-andforth policies because we have to balance this with our economy,” Vergeire said.

daily

average—637 cases—last

The Philippines has confirmed over four million COVID-19 infections, with more than 66,000 deaths, since the pandemic began in early 2020. n