"A rush to lift will only have grave consequences."
"A rush to lift will only have grave consequences."
‘Anyare’—this was what Albay Representative Joey Salceda had to say as he decried the inability of the Department of Health and the Inter-Agency Task Force to ramp up the agreed COVID-19 testing and contact tracing operations in the entire Luzon and other areas under Enhanced Community Quarantine.
Noting that only through massive, targeted testing and contract tracing can we justify any kind of easing of lockdown restrictions, the veteran solon who is himself an experienced local executive knows whereof he speaks. Given the rapid transmissibility, virulence and the unique features of this invisible enemy, there is no question that the old reliable WHO formula in combating pandemics of lockdown—test, trace and protect (TTP)—remains our main and perhaps only weapon against COVID-19 for as long as no vaccine and cure come along.
Just to emphasize the point if only to get DOH and IATF on the ball given the grave consequences of continued inaction, I have decided to print parts of Salceda's lament which was posted in a friend's Viber group and the timely advisory of Doctor Dennis Garcia, a known virologist, about the danger of any “rush-to-lift" being espoused by a number of politicians and business groups who should know better.
Here's Salceda's lament:
"..IATF/NTF—Anyare, palipat lipat na tracing from DOH to LGUs, to OCD now to PNP. Pero till now only 5 thousand out of 77,000 tested is from tracing. So nag aantay tayo na may magkasakit at pumunta sa ospital saka natin isubo sa testing capacity. Pano yong mga asymptomatic. Even if we lift, consumer confidence, labor confidence and business confidence will not return. Lifting will only return the virus into a second wave. Sa bawat recommend ko ng lockdown (at naka tatlo na ako) ang bigat bigat sa kalooban. Ten thousand testing per day, more tracing and more isolation—we only have 17 days left. Sinayang natin ang sakripisyo ng tao kasi hindi naman tayo nag targetted testing and so few tracing. Diyos Ko. My God."
Salceda's statement definitely reinforces what the medical experts have been saying all along—a rush to lift will only have grave consequences and perhaps may even bring us down to our knees in sheer unimaginable terms. To think that aside from our inability to ramp up testing and contact tracing we have yet to expand our medical care capacity with enough personnel, equipment, funding and other resources and, yes, facilities (both isolation and intensive care).
That lament is reinforced in the observations posted last April 27 by Doctor Dennis Garcia, a known virologist. Here's parts of Garcia's notes:
"The Phl lockdown has been quite successful. What should we expect when the lockdown is lifted on May 15? We had 7579 cases as of yesterday with 285 cases. The US has 965,910 cases and 30,000 new cases a day. The US had one case on January 23 and as their lockdown was not uniformly done across the 50 states, they have disproportionately much worse than we have, considering that the US population is only three times ours. Indeed, our 200 cases/day for a country of 110 million is already very low; we cannot realistically achieve an actual figure of zero.
‘’The reason government extended the lockdown to May 15 is mostly because the LGUs, hospitals, healthcare system and the continuing education of our people, are still far from ideal. We need to continue to educate everyone that the COVID-19 virus has high infectivity, high pathogenicity and high virulence in the setting of a propagative pandemic where the population has no pre-existing immunity. The feared polio virus has high infectivity but has low pathogenicity and low virulence but we have vaccine for it."
Garcia then proceeds to extrapolate what happens after lifting using Pasig City which has 20 infected people as an example. Upon lifting with people going out of their homes without masks and without physical distancing with certain assumptions, which are usually used in mathematical calculations on the COVID-19 such as incubation period, reproduction rate and disease manifestations (80 percent mild, 20 percent grave which will be needing hospitalization). On that basis, Garcia said that by July 3, Pasig will have 50,977 cases, 20 percent of which or 10,195 will be needing hospital care. Meaning, there should be at least 10,000 beds available by that time to take care of the Pasig cases alone. I do not think we have that number of beds in all of the hospitals in the entire Metro Manila, Calabarzon and Central Luzon. Plainly, that will collapse the hospital system.
So, what then should we do aside from ramping up testing, contact tracing, educating and disciplining people and enforcing more responsibly existing protocols? Here's Garcia:
"We are Asians. Let us be educated and disciplined like the Taiwanese and South Koreans. We do not have the hospital care system like these two countries. It is our discipline, as a people, that will get us through. Each person, each town, each city and each province should regard the other beside us as a collection of links—each link is dependent on the next. It is only if we work as one big family of Filipinos that we can hope to survive this crisis."
Indeed, it is only by taking care of ourselves and of each other that we will be able to work our way out of this crisis. Whether we are talking health or the economy. We cannot be islands unto ourselves. There is no other way.