After ECQ, can we avoid a Covid-19 resurgence?
ONE of the online memes making fun of the alarmingly poor implementation of modified enhanced community quarantine ( MECQ) at Metro Manila malls showed an utterly undistanced crowd of people waiting to enter a shopping center. The caption read, translated from Filipino and referring to the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19): “Let’s all please stop jostling and be patient. Everyone will be given Covid.”
The meme isn’t anything to laugh about, of course, for the crowds outside malls when ECQ eased into MECQ almost surely led to the infection of countless people, who would then have gone home and probably infected household members.
That contagion scenario is sadly what Health Secretary Francisco Duque 3rd, THE head of the Inter- Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases ( IATF- EID), fears about the latest turn of the pandemic in the country.
Threat of ‘the third wave’
Asked during Senate hearings yesterday what was the worst that could happen after strict lockdown, the Department of Health ( DoH) chief said ( translated from Filipino): “The worst-case scenario here is a resumption of outbreaks, and there would be a second wave — actually, we would be on the third wave.”
Experts noted that the first wave was the entry of Covid-19 in the country in January, carried by Chinese tourists, while the second was the local transmission mostly in Metro Manila since February, which ECQ sought to slow down.
But community quarantine was never sustainable beyond a few months, due to its crushing effect on the economy and the people, especially low- income households. It eventually had to be loosened, supposedly replaced by mass testing and contact tracing, to find and isolate disease carriers.
However, that second strategy may not be happening as many expected. Palace and IATFEID spokesman Secretary Harry Roque Jr. said yesterday that there would be “targeted” testing covering 1.5 to 2 percent of the population, since mass testing of tens of millions of people would be “physically impossible.”
Thus, South Korea’s successful test- and- trace strategy may not be on the cards here. Moreover, the national discipline, unity and obedience to authority needed to counter contagion and forged among South Koreans, Singaporeans, Vietnamese and Taiwan people by decades under threat from hostile neighbors — those traits seem absent here.
As soon as total lockdown was lifted, Metro Manilans packed roads and retail areas, prompting the IATF-EID to order malls closed two days after reopening. The Philippine National Police will now help control and space crowds outside malls.
For business establishments, themselves there is debate whether all employees should be tested for Covid- 19 at company expense, to which several medical and scientific bodies object, including associations of microbiologists, family physicians, occupational medicine practitioners, as well as the Philippine College of Physicians and the Philippine
Medical Association.
On religious activities, even as the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines issued guidelines for church gatherings, Archdiocese of Manila administrator Bishop Roderick Pabillo took issue with the IATF- EID directive limiting every religious event to 10 people max.
Critics have also cited shortcomings in government communications on quarantine modifications. And thankfully, classes are to resume only in late August, or there would have been even more distancing issues to pick in the education sector.
Three must- dos in easing ECQ
What to do? Since March, risk analysts at the Center for Strategy, Enterprise & Intelligence (CenSEI), headed by this writer, have advocated combining targeted testing with risk assessment surveys.
The Department of Science and Technology lists several of these Covid-19 apps ( http://www. dost.gov.ph/knowledge-resources/ ph-app-developers-fight-covid19-with-online-innovations.
html), including the FightCovid app ( https://fightcovid.app), which helps determine if one should be tested.
First advocated for barangay officials to survey households before testing those with high risk, the apps should now be applied to employees back at work. Those whose home and commuting conditions indicate significant infection risk would be tested and, if necessary, quarantined, along with those they had potentially infectious contact with.
Apps can also monitor the location of quarantined people, and plot those who may have been exposed to them. In sum, with these risk- assessment apps, the country’s limited testing capacity can be most efficiently and effectively used to find and contain infections among the people. A second imperative is a masafriendly information, education and communications (IEC) program to mobilize tens of millions of Filipinos to abide by anti-contagion protocols. Daily pronouncements from the Palace and IATFEID and Cabinet memorandums in legalese must be translated into messages on mass and social media, including phone texts, which are engaging, easy to understand, and highly motivating.
Lastly, public and private elementary and secondary schools must speedily recast lesson plans and materials to have classes with reduced classroom numbers. The Department of Education has helped this process along by adjusting the competency standards to be required this coming academic year.
Instructors must then come up with learning materials and class procedures that give students more home reading and work, so that they learn enough while spending less time at school. Teachers may need to meet half their classes three days a week, and the other half on the other three days.
For sure, many other to-dos are needed to prevent ECQ’s easing from turning into Covid- 19’ s decimating resurgence. But these three initiatives — risk assessment combined with targeted testing, masa- friendly IEC programs, and half- and- half basic education classes — deserve serious consideration.