Executive Summary
Since the COVID-19 breakdown in Wuhan last November 2019, the majority of the countries experienced economic losses. The virus has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and contracted by millions of people. To prevent the spreading of the virus in the Philippines, the government imposed the enhanced community quarantine in Luzon on March 16, 2020. Despite this, the still virus spreads in the country, claiming lives, shutting down businesses, and hampering human activities that need transportation.
Critical issues have arisen as a result of the pandemic. The study aims to answer if the government is focused on addressing these critical issues. The dataset comes from the transcripts from the Presidential Communications Operation Office (PCOO). These transcripts were extracted and cleaned before preprocessing using text data vectorization. Dimensionality reduction through truncated SVD is used on the preprocessed data. To extract the topics, representative-based and agglomerative clustering methods are implemented.
This study led to the following conclusions: 1) In the context of Pres. Duterte’s weekly program, the government continues to discuss critical issues related to the pandemic; and 2) Using clustering analysis, topics for plans, strategies, and challenges related to the pandemic were identified. These topics include healthcare system challenges, vaccines, and corruption during the implementation of the social amelioration program.
