Pandemic catch-up after a year and a half?
Published Aug 5, 2021 12:02 am
Of substance and spirit
We were confounded by a piece of news reported two days ago. Contact Testing Czar Baguio City Mayor Benjamin Magalong announced that “all COVID-19 data in the Philippines, including vaccination records and contact tracing information all over the country, will be collected and analyzed by a national digital warehouse to make decision-making more efficient amid the threat of the more transmissible Delta variant.”
After more than a year and a half, through a few waves of the coronavirus, with 1.6 million infected residents and over 28 thousand deaths, the Philippines could only play catch-up by launching a central data warehousing system.
It did not seem to matter that the pandemic inflicted fear among our people, froze business activities and caused five quarters of economic contraction, loss of millions of jobs and more hunger and poverty.
We need some sense of urgency. COVID-19 and its deadly consequences should be big enough to push the authorities to act fast, but it’s not enough to be big. They should be expected. That requires competence.
We recall Mayor Magalong was already the tracing czar when he admitted that he attended the birthday celebration of TV and radio host Tim Yap at the Manor Hotel in Camp John Hay in Baguio in mid-January 2021. Big groups remained prohibited due to the prolonged lockdown. To his credit, Magalong quit his post but the Palace prevailed upon him to reconsider because the National Task Force Against the Coronavirus Disease 2019 “believed in (his) competence to lead the contact tracing efforts in the country.”
Our people’s benchmark of competence and governance is not lofty. Pinoys have only basic expectations, but our health authorities’ standards may just be too profound to understand.
First, the system administrator, despite this protracted health crisis, continues to struggle with glitches associated with the integration of multiple data systems.
Second, it’s only recently that the health authorities have realized that fraud could have been committed in the vaccine rollout in the regions. There’s therefore a need to reconcile data on multiple registrations to guarantee inoculation as well as data between national and local governments.
Third, at last the health authorities understood that the system needs to track the movement of people across boundaries after seeing great incidence of infection and deaths from that viral scourge.
Finally, it’s ironic that the tracing czar himself admitted that it dawned on him that the system should “be fast-tracked because of the threat of Delta.”
Heaven forbid but fast-tracking the system should have been done on day one of the pandemic last year. Delta is already a mutation of the original virus. It’s more than a threat. It’s real and it has begun its chaotic surge, and we are still familiarizing ourselves with the rules of engagement?
Yet OCTA Research Group warned us more than a month ago that we must brace ourselves for the Delta variant which is 50-60 percent more infectious. And only after one month, on August 1, that the Health Department advised the public that the variant’s contagiousness is as potent as that of chicken pox.
In the first place, our health experts should know that with the prolonged pandemic, it was only a matter of time that the virus’ mutations should eventuate in another upsurge.
With some initial sightings, the projection is that the daily active cases could rise to 18,000 to 30,000 by September. What we gather from DOH press advisories to the local governments is that they should strengthen their prevent-detect-isolate-treat-reintegrate strategies and to expand their health care systems in anticipation of the Delta variant.
Which brings us back to the proposed centralized health database warehousing system that is yet to be field and pilot tested while sorting out various system infirmities. Even the fundamental genome sequencing process is glacial. How could local governments firm up their health systems in the middle of the health war already in progress?
Cebu City, for instance, was reported to be suffering from acute shortage of facilities for COVID-19 patients. City Hall officials admitted that Cebu hospitals are “full to the brim.” For some hospitals, while they have bed capacity, they are short of medical frontliners. Some nurses were reported to have resigned due to the delay in the release of their salaries. The sad part is that Cebu is still in the planning stage of hiring 200 nurses for deployment to various hospitals.
We foresee the health facilities in Metro Manila’s high-risk areas based on their highest percentage increases in new infections in the last seven days similarly overwhelmed. This is consistent with the recent comment from the World Health Organization (WHO) that one, there are many undetected variant cases and two, there could be much larger footprint of the Delta variant in the country.
This is disturbing.
What is most disturbing is the unwise use of public funds. Between January and June 2021, PhilHealth received P45 billion in subsidy, or 67 percent increase. However, many hospitals remain unpaid of their advances. Medical frontliners claimed they received their allowances only from the newspapers despite the cash allocation from both Bayanihan 1 and 2. Full vaccination rate is only a tenth of the population.
Without doubt, the forecast of P210 billion potential loss during the two weeks of the lockdown cannot be blamed on the Delta factor alone. Rather, it is more the outcome of slow-burn pandemic response.
We were confounded by a piece of news reported two days ago. Contact Testing Czar Baguio City Mayor Benjamin Magalong announced that “all COVID-19 data in the Philippines, including vaccination records and contact tracing information all over the country, will be collected and analyzed by a national digital warehouse to make decision-making more efficient amid the threat of the more transmissible Delta variant.”
After more than a year and a half, through a few waves of the coronavirus, with 1.6 million infected residents and over 28 thousand deaths, the Philippines could only play catch-up by launching a central data warehousing system.
It did not seem to matter that the pandemic inflicted fear among our people, froze business activities and caused five quarters of economic contraction, loss of millions of jobs and more hunger and poverty.
We need some sense of urgency. COVID-19 and its deadly consequences should be big enough to push the authorities to act fast, but it’s not enough to be big. They should be expected. That requires competence.
We recall Mayor Magalong was already the tracing czar when he admitted that he attended the birthday celebration of TV and radio host Tim Yap at the Manor Hotel in Camp John Hay in Baguio in mid-January 2021. Big groups remained prohibited due to the prolonged lockdown. To his credit, Magalong quit his post but the Palace prevailed upon him to reconsider because the National Task Force Against the Coronavirus Disease 2019 “believed in (his) competence to lead the contact tracing efforts in the country.”
Our people’s benchmark of competence and governance is not lofty. Pinoys have only basic expectations, but our health authorities’ standards may just be too profound to understand.
First, the system administrator, despite this protracted health crisis, continues to struggle with glitches associated with the integration of multiple data systems.
Second, it’s only recently that the health authorities have realized that fraud could have been committed in the vaccine rollout in the regions. There’s therefore a need to reconcile data on multiple registrations to guarantee inoculation as well as data between national and local governments.
Third, at last the health authorities understood that the system needs to track the movement of people across boundaries after seeing great incidence of infection and deaths from that viral scourge.
Finally, it’s ironic that the tracing czar himself admitted that it dawned on him that the system should “be fast-tracked because of the threat of Delta.”
Heaven forbid but fast-tracking the system should have been done on day one of the pandemic last year. Delta is already a mutation of the original virus. It’s more than a threat. It’s real and it has begun its chaotic surge, and we are still familiarizing ourselves with the rules of engagement?
Yet OCTA Research Group warned us more than a month ago that we must brace ourselves for the Delta variant which is 50-60 percent more infectious. And only after one month, on August 1, that the Health Department advised the public that the variant’s contagiousness is as potent as that of chicken pox.
In the first place, our health experts should know that with the prolonged pandemic, it was only a matter of time that the virus’ mutations should eventuate in another upsurge.
With some initial sightings, the projection is that the daily active cases could rise to 18,000 to 30,000 by September. What we gather from DOH press advisories to the local governments is that they should strengthen their prevent-detect-isolate-treat-reintegrate strategies and to expand their health care systems in anticipation of the Delta variant.
Which brings us back to the proposed centralized health database warehousing system that is yet to be field and pilot tested while sorting out various system infirmities. Even the fundamental genome sequencing process is glacial. How could local governments firm up their health systems in the middle of the health war already in progress?
Cebu City, for instance, was reported to be suffering from acute shortage of facilities for COVID-19 patients. City Hall officials admitted that Cebu hospitals are “full to the brim.” For some hospitals, while they have bed capacity, they are short of medical frontliners. Some nurses were reported to have resigned due to the delay in the release of their salaries. The sad part is that Cebu is still in the planning stage of hiring 200 nurses for deployment to various hospitals.
We foresee the health facilities in Metro Manila’s high-risk areas based on their highest percentage increases in new infections in the last seven days similarly overwhelmed. This is consistent with the recent comment from the World Health Organization (WHO) that one, there are many undetected variant cases and two, there could be much larger footprint of the Delta variant in the country.
This is disturbing.
What is most disturbing is the unwise use of public funds. Between January and June 2021, PhilHealth received P45 billion in subsidy, or 67 percent increase. However, many hospitals remain unpaid of their advances. Medical frontliners claimed they received their allowances only from the newspapers despite the cash allocation from both Bayanihan 1 and 2. Full vaccination rate is only a tenth of the population.
Without doubt, the forecast of P210 billion potential loss during the two weeks of the lockdown cannot be blamed on the Delta factor alone. Rather, it is more the outcome of slow-burn pandemic response.