"The pace at which we can resume business activities will be determined by the speed and efficiency of our testing, tracing and adequacy of COVID 19 treatment centers."
To stay healthy and avoid illness is the most urgent personal concern of Filipinos. This has been the consistent finding of Pulse Asia’s national surveys since 2014. The most recent of these studies also show that providing education for children and finishing school ranked second, followed by having a secure, well-paying job or livelihood, and having enough food to eat every day. Sadly, this pandemic has hit us hard on these prime concerns as we now struggle to stop the invisible onslaught of this disease from China.
Our public health system, neglected for decades, was suddenly thrust into an all-out war against COVID 19 just when initial funds were starting to be allocated for the programs under the Universal Health Care Act. This exposed the magnitude of our health care system’s problems that the government must address with great urgency.
Food and livelihood are day-to-day concerns for millions of workers who are now locked out of their jobs or who have lost their hand-to-mouth income from their daily toils in the underground economy. Though billions are being spent in distribution of relief goods and financial assistance from both government and the private sector, these resources will eventually run out if the economy stays closed. Most vulnerable are the small and medium businesses where the majority of the country’s workforce are employed. Hence, we are in the dilemma of giving the virus more opportunities to spread if we prematurely resume business activities or risk an equally damaging and destabilizing situation of economic ruin.
Government has announced a new set of guidelines in a move to restart the operations of some businesses in the lockdown areas and for lower-risk areas where the less stringent general community quarantine (GCQ) restrictions will be implemented. In areas still under ECQ, an expanded list of over 30 businesses will be allowed to operate on the condition that proper health precautions are observed. For areas that will be under GCQ, most businesses will be allowed but must follow “minimum health standards.” This is a welcome development as some supply lines for food and other essentials have been cut or delayed due to the collateral effects of the travel bans and lockdowns imposed by the ECQ.
The novelty of this crisis understandably forces our government leaders to exercise some educated guess work for lack of available knowledge and data needed for strategic and tactical decisions. But a common factor of successful anti-virus strategies in countries like South Korea is their early and aggressive mass testing and systematic tracking to chase down and isolate the deadly bug to the last human host. Infectious disease experts have stressed that accurate and extensive mass testing must be integral to all mitigation efforts to gather enough data that can be processed to guide governments on whether ongoing lockdowns are working or not.
With the ECQ again extended until May 15, the Inter-Agency Task Force – National Task Force (IATF-NTF), the Department of Health (DOH), supported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), organized the TASK FORCE T3 (Test, Trace and Treat). Spinning off from the many pro-active aid initiatives led by the business groups, the important mission of this newly launched public-private task force is to boost mass testing to 30,000 per day from the current rate of over 4,000 per day.
This project will use RT-PCR (Reverse Transmission – Polymerase Chain Reaction) and will need DOH certified labs that are at least BioSafety Level 2, well equipped, and have trained medical personnel.
To reach 30,000 tests a day, Task Force T3 will raise testing capacity by almost 19,000 daily, activate 192 additional machines, and operationalize 24 big testing or pop-up labs to increase access in Visayas and Mindanao. Expanding this capacity among the regions will cut travel time to laboratories and quicken delivery of results.
These are formidable objectives but the best thing going for this task force is the quickness and vast resources of the private sector which counts: Ayala Group’s AC Health, Metro Pacific (MPIC) Hospital Group, Unilab, the Philippine National Red Cross and big business groups under the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundation as the initial members.
The pace at which we can resume business activities will be determined by the speed and efficiency of our testing, tracing and adequacy of COVID 19 treatment centers. The task force should also tap the support of technology companies that have information management solutions that can process the data gathered from these operations into instructive reports that would be sound basis for fine-tuning guidelines and harmonizing actions at all levels of this war.
I hope this public-private partnership, now fighting a crisis, will evolve into a new movement that would lead a renewed spirit of nation-building in the new normal world.