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Manila Bulletin devider Philippines devider National devider DOH urges hospitals to boost capacity against COVID-19

DOH urges hospitals to boost capacity against COVID-19

Published Mar 10, 2021 03:09 pm

The Department of Health (DOH) urged the different hospitals to allocate more beds dedicated for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) patients as the country is seeing again a spike in new cases.

“What we intend to do and ask the different hospitals is that they must go back to the 20 percent allocation of their beds or even more if there is a surge in these cases,” said DOH Undersecretary Leopoldo Vega in an interview with CNN Philippines on Wednesday, March 10.

Vega said that the rise in cases is kind of "alarming because this is almost a repeat of what happened in August 2020.”

“I'm saying it is alarming because if we are not able to control this in terms of containment of the virus, definitely there might be a possibility of a surge in the hospitals,” he said.

The Health official also asked the local government units to implement a localized lockdown if they observe a clustering of cases in a specific area.

“If you noticed last year we were able to contain the virus and made sure that it went down in the several months that went ahead. So we are now moving again at the same kind of strategy: we have to contain the virus by doing localized lockdowns.” he said.

“These localized lockdowns have to be enforced once again because you know the transmission of this virus occurs in clusters… So the only way we can contain this, is if we can actually make sure that they are isolated and contact trace in terms of the different people that they are with,” he added.

With the implementation of localized lockdown and observing the minimum health standards, Vega believes that “we can make sure that the virus can be contained or the transmission can be lower down.”

When asked about the projection of the OCTA research group that the country may see 6,000 cases daily by the end of March, Vega said that it might happen if “nothing has to be done.”

“If you look at the projections made by OCTA, these are actually assumptions if nothing has to be done - in other words if we don't do anything, if it is still business as usual, we don't do the minimum health standards, then definitely the rise will come,” he added.

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