FINDING ANSWERS

President Duterte’s swift decision to put Metro Manila and the provinces of Laguna, Cavite, Rizal, and Bulacan under the stricter modified enhanced community quarantine (MECQ) from Aug. 4 to 18 is a welcome development for our medical community.

While it was short of the ECQ or Enhanced Community Quarantine the nation’s healthcare workers had sought in a letter to the President, returning to MECQ is certainly much better than continuing with the more lenient General Community Quarantine (GCQ) believed to have contributed to the current spike in coronavirus cases.

A stricter mode of community quarantine was sought in a letter addressed to President Duterte and signed by Dr. Mario Panaligan, president of the Philippine College of Physicians, and supported by the Philippine Medical Association and 60 other medical associations, asking to  “recalibrate strategies” in tackling the coronavirus pandemic.

“We are waging a losing battle against COVID-19, and we need to draw up a consolidated, definitive plan of action,” the letter dated Aug. 1 stressed. “Healthcare workers are united in sounding off a distress signal to the nation – our healthcare system has been overwhelmed.”

The letter which was made public apparently offended the President who, in his response aired late Sunday night, said: “Do not try to demean government. You’re not actually criticizing, you demean government, your own government… There is no need for you – 1,000 of you – telling us what to do publicly.”

Although the President was furious over the letter going public, I think there’s a silver lining to it. It made the people grasp the seriousness of the situation and see the reality that all’s not well as some officials in government would like to portray.

“The progressive lifting of quarantine has inadvertently fueled public misperception that the pandemic is getting better. It is not. The progressive decline in compliance will push us to the brink to become the next New York City, where COVID-19 patients die at home or in stretchers, unable to find vacancies ,” the medical associations warned in the letter.

“The first line of defense is the public, so people need to be reminded that we need to use masks and face shields, wash hands and practice social and physical distancing – now more than ever,” they stressed. Thus, with the contents of the letter to the President made public, it somehow stopped people from getting complacent in following basic health protocols at all times.

In asking for a two-week ECQ, the medical frontliners said such period could be used as “time out” to refine strategies and address the following urgent problems:Hospital workforce deficiency; failure of case finding and isolation; failure of contact tracing and quarantine; transportation safety; workplace safety; public compliance with self-protection; and social amelioration.

Dr. Tony Leachon, a top health expert and former president of the Philippine College of Physicians, was guest in my teleradyo progam Sagot Ko ‘Yan last Sunday and we discussed the current situation and what drove the country’s health frontliners to sound the alarm on the need for comprehensive strategy to fight the coronavirus crisis.

He said that instead of “flattening the curve” to slow down infections and prevent the healthcare system from getting overwhelmed, what happened was similar to a staircase whereby the number of cases would rise, enter a plateau, surge again, go into a plateau, and so on.

“It is time for us to have an extensive, comprehensive plan and strategy, a road map, and we should realign policies and have a central body to oversee everything… all LGUs should have a common template or blueprint to follow,”  Dr. Leachon said as he explained what the healthcare workers wanted in tackling the current health crisis.

He also cited the need for the so-called “Hammer and Dance” concept – made famous by health data expert Tomas Pueyo in an article viewed millions of times since it was posted in the Internet last March, whereby the period of strict lockdown and aggressive measures to suppress the virus is referred to as the “hammer” and the subsequent period of living with the health crisis as the “dance” with less aggressive measures.

With the Philippines leading in the number of coronavirus cases in Southeast Asia in terms of per million population, and amid the projection by some experts that the country’s caseload would surge to 150,000 by the end of August at the current rate, it is imperative to come up with a better plan of action and national strategy to effectively put under control the galloping rate of infections.

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