The president of the Philippine Hospital Association (PHA) painted a grim image of the situation in hospitals in Metro Manila as medical facilitates race against time to treat the overwhelming number of infected patients amid the ongoing surge of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19).
“The situations is very dire. I actually describe it as a nightmare because the most dreaded thing that we do not want to happen is now happening in reality,” PHA president Dr. Jaime Almora said in an interview over CNN Philippines on Tuesday, April 6.
Almora lamented that hospitals have become a place full of anger, suffering, fear, despair, and frustration as healthcare workers struggle to keep up with the number of patients seeking medical attention.
“They’re also fearful for their own lives and their families but you can just imagine their frustration and how they agonize looking at these patients helplessly,” he said.
“Seeing patients dying is one of the things that really breaks a health worker’s heart because every health worker wants to be of help but when you become incapacitated, when you’re helpless already because of the sheer number its really a situation that it’s like from the doomsday scenario,” he added.
The Philippines breached the 800,000-mark in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases as the Department of Health (DOH) reported an additional 8,355 new cases on Monday, April 5.
To curb the surge in infection, the government has extended until April 11 the implementation of enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) in Metro Manila and nearby provinces of Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, and Rizal.
‘Everything can ran out of supply’
The hospital group official said they are now running out of ventilators as such machines are not easy to acquire, but he noted that they currently have a better supply of personal protective equipment (PPE).
As for the supply of oxygen, Almora said this depends on how fast can manufacturing plants produce it.
“Luckily, we have also machines already that generate oxygen so that can be remedied,” he said. “Everything can ran out of supply depending on the supply chain.”
The PHA chief also said that the imposition of the ECQ in Greater Metro Manila Area would help decongest hospitals.
“The ECQ would help, the longer the better. But there’s so many factors that have to be considered, the economic factors and all those things,” he said.
“What is really important now is to look at all our approaches and to improve on them. Look at the things that we have not yet done, like for example on detection, there are things that we have not done yet to improve the detection,” he added.
Promoting ‘self-swabbing’
To detect those infected with COVID-19, contact tracing is conducted to determine individuals who were in close contact with a COVID-19 patient.
“What we could do now is to equip everyone the knowledge of their covid status. Everyone now should know what is their covid status, are they positive or negative,” Almora said.
He explained that this can be done if people can collect their own specimen and then perform the examination.
“The rapid antigen test is fairly sensitive examination. It can be used for surveillance. This has been already proven that positive for rapid antigen test also turns out positive for RT-PCR,” he said.
Almora said he have been promoting the conduct of “self-swabbing” as a way of increasing the detection rate.
“If we can increase the detection rate by teaching people to do self swabbing because self swabbing is actually the better way to do it. It is less painful…because they can feel it themselves, they can direct it so that it’s not painful,” he said.
“And the rapid antigen test is like a pregnancy test so it’s easy to perform, and if people has a knowledge of their COVID status, then they will find a way to isolate themselves and not infect other people,” he added.