As the country's cases of coronavirus continued to soar, the government will now be relying on "mobile hospitals" to provide care and treatment to people infected with the coronavirus disease.
According to Presidential spokesman Harry Roque, more tents will be established to serve as temporary health care facilities for coronavirus patients since it would take time to build hospitals.
The latest decision was reached during a meeting held by Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea, Senator Christopher Go and Health Secretary Francisco Duque last weekend.
"We had a special meeting actually, attended by ES and Senator Bong Go with Secretary Duque, there is now plan to build mobile tents, ICU facilities of up to 200 beds so we have even identified the area, owned by a government-owned and -controlled corporation for this special ICU facility," Roque said over ANC's Headstart program Monday, April 5.
"So we are doing what other countries did at the height of their own pandemics and relying now on mobile hospitals. So because it takes time to build real hospitals, we need to rely on these mobile hospitals now," he added.
Roque noted that 110 beds have already been added to the Quezon Institute in Quezon City in a bid to accommodate more patients
"The good news is, we have now built additional critical care capacity. Today, we inaugurate a hundred ten ICU bed capacity in what used to be the Quezon Institute in QI. It will be operational after a brief ceremony at noon today," he said.
"And in addition to that, we have 160 additional beds in Tala, as well as in Quirino Hospital," he said.
The Philippines has so far 135,526 active cases after the Department of Health reported 11,028 cases Sunday, April 4. Amid the continued surge of cases, several hospitals in Metro Manila have declared full capacity of their COVID-19 beds.
The Department of Health, however, has assured the public that DOH-retained hospitals remained operational amid continued efforts to hire additional personnel and purchase more medicines.
Metro Manila and four nearby provinces remained under enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) until April 11 in a bid to slow down the COVID-19 transmission and prevent hospitals from getting overwhelmed with cases. The government is studying the possibility of easing the stringent lockdown and imposing instead the less restrictive modified enhanced community quarantine (MECQ) next week to further bring down the coronavirus cases.
"I don’t think ECQ for a third week is actually a possibility. In fact based on the model of the DOH (Department of Health), what they recommended was two weeks of ECQ including last week and then we had earlier another week of bubble to be followed by a week of MECQ,” Roque said.
"And if we, in fact, implement the minimum health protocols and we intensify our prevention, detection, isolation, tracing initiatives, we expect the numbers to go down by around 4,000 a day by May 15. So that’s the model that we are pursuing – two weeks of ECQ and another week of MECQ,” he added.