Even the contact tracing czar himself is "frustrated" with the country's contact tracing system.
Baguio City mayor and appointed contact tracing head Benjamin Magalong lamented on Tuesday, March 9, the confusion and delay over the use of contact tracing applications to help track close contacts of suspected and confirmed COVID-19 patients.
(JJ Landingin / MANILA BULLETIN FILE PHOTO)
At the House Committee on Health's hearing on the resolution calling for a "unified national contact tracing protocol", Magalong said that he was "suprised" that national government agencies and local government units (LGUs) are using different applications for their contact tracing efforts.
"Even us, the contact tracing team, is a bit a confused on what applications are we going to use," Magalong said in the virtual hearing.
"In fact, the national government acknowledge contact tracing application StaySafe and I myself was really surprised that suddenly, here comes different types of application that were endorsed by different agencies. And we're not even consulted about it," he added.
Magalong recalled the Resolution No. 85 issued by the Interagency Task Force (IATF) on the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases in November 26, 2020, which designates StaySafe.Ph as the government's digital contact tracing app "of choice" and mandates its use by all government agencies and LGUs.
But for those already using their contact tracing application, they were encouraged to integrate with the StaySafe system.
The mayor particularly took exception to the app used by the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), which he said was launched "without even proper consultation with us." In a separate resolution issued just last February 26, the IATF institutionalized the DOST's "Safe, Swift, and Smart Passage (S-PaSS) Travel Management System as the "one-stop shop application/communication for travelers." Magalong, however, said they have "exterted so much effort, so much time" in developing the StaySafe with private firm MultiSys Technologies Corp, along with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), Department of Health (DOH).
"I was hoping that these will be settled among all these agencies -- it's really frustrating…Really frustrating," he said, telling lawmakers that this was the reason for him to concentrate instead on building the capacity of LGUs for conducting the manual contact tracing.
He appealed to agencies: "I hope that DOST, DOH, and DICT will finally get their acts together." During the House hearing, Health Undersecretary Eric Tayag explained that the DOH is still not accepting the donation of StaySafe application to the government due to the lack of certification from the DICT, as the IATF had also required.
Tayag also said that process "has been taking so long" because Multisys supposedly kept modifying and expanding the app's features.
"It's giving us a hard time, together with the DICT, the National Privacy Commission, to actually, vet, validate, confirm the usage of the StaySafe," said Tayag, who heads the DOH's Knowledege Management and Information Technology Service.
StaySafe, he added, was originally intended for use in the manual contact tracing, to assist contact tracers in finding close contacts of probable, suspected and confirmed COVID-19 cases.
Lawyer Omar Sana of the DICT confirmed the non-issuance of certifcation, saying that "there are certain requirements in our guidelines that have not been complied with" by Multisys.
Still, Multisys founder and chief executive officer David Almirol Jr. insisted that it was the DOH that has been delaying their rollout.
"Even there are resolutions already, there are implementations and development that they are trying to repeat what we have done. So it's a total waste of time," Almirol claimed.
Despite this, Almirol said StaySafe is already being used in 700 LGUs, over 184,000 establishments and by over eight million users in the country.