Privilege Speech of Deputy Speaker Loren Legarda On COVID-19 and Biodiversity Conservation

We are living our days in fear of even casual contact with each other. Events have been canceled, travel plans changed, the public’s attention consumed by a threat that the world has just woken up to: the 2019 novel coronavirus (nCoV) — a new strain of coronavirus first identified in Wuhan, Hubei, China in December last year.  The latest news reports indicated that the World Health Organization (WHO) has already given this virus an official name:  COVID-19.