An expert of the OCTA Research on Tuesday, April 27, recommended the extension of modified enhanced community quarantine (MECQ) citing the group's projections that hospitalization in Metro Manila may only ease by June.

Microbiologist-priest Nicanor Austriaco said OCTA supports the call of the Department of Health and the medical community to extend MECQ in the NCR (National Capital Region) Plus bubble to "at least a week" to further lower the reproduction number.

"In OCTA we are completely data-driven, so we would like to do this one week at a time. We would like to see again at this time next week what are the numbers? What is the R (reproduction number)? In order for us to know whether or not it is safe to re-enter into GCQ (general community quarantine)," Austriaco said in an ANC interview.

He explained that the recommendation of OCTA to extend the MECQ status is due to the "unstable" number of daily recorded cases in the NCR Plus bubble.

"The decrease in cases is not comparable across all the LGUs (local government units) at the NCR Plus bubble," Austriaco said.

"The concern is that if we prematurely enter into GCQ then the cases in one LGU, which are unstable will trigger spikes in adjacent LGUs and we will resurge again," he added.

Moreover, Austriaco said that if the reproduction number stabilizes at 0.9, OCTA's "forecast indicates that hospitals will not reach pre-surge levels until June."

"So we would like to recommend an extension of MECQ to continue to force that R number. The lower that is, the lower the number of daily cases," he added.

To prevent a "resurge" of COVID cases in the NCR Plus bubble, Austriaco encouraged the government to "establish new levels of capacity for contact tracing, testing, and quarantine and isolation."

"The national government has already announced that there are several initiatives ongoing, such as hiring additional 25,000 contact tracers," he said.

"We should not return to GCQ until those 25,000 contact tracers know what they are doing. Reports say that they will be hired by next week so we should give the national government and LGUs time to set this up and to put this into place," he added.

"The same thing with our isolation and quarantine facilities. I am grateful to hear that the national government is attempting to hire more healthcare workers so we should make sure that those healthcare workers are hired before we return to GCQ," he also said.

Austriaco asked the national government to "publish those numbers to allow us to know that we will be safe once we enter into GCQ," as OCTA "does not have access to those numbers at this time."

"How many contact tracers have been hired and are now on the job. How many new health care workers have been hired and are now on the job? It’s not a matter of extra beds because we know that they publish bed numbers every day but we need health care workers, particularly nurses to staff these beds. We have enough of them, how many more have we hired in the last few weeks?" Austriaco asked.

"Since April 1st, despite the tragic number of new cases, the number of cases admitted to our hospitals never really reached beyond 8,000, so we believe based on our modeling that the limitation here is actually not beds, it is actually health care workers. Those in COVID-19 wards are already exhausted," he added.