DoH rises to lead role in battling pandemic with new Covid plan

IT is our considered view that the new coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) action plan, which the Department of Health unveiled on Wednesday as the country’s new battle plan to defeat the coronavirus pandemic, should be welcomed by the nation and treated with guarded optimism in assessing its prospects of success. We say this for several reasons.

First, the disclosure that the government, through our Department of Health (DoH), has at the ready a new plan for battling Covid-19 is a pleasant surprise. It is incontestably an improvement over the “no road map surprise” that President Rodrigo Duterte sprang on our people and our country during his much-awaited fifth State of the Nation Address on July 27.

Second, our Health department is finally assuming its leadership role in combating the pandemic as the government’s principal agency and authority for the protection of public health and the prevention of infectious diseases. It has assumed the chairmanship of the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID), which is the primary policymaking arm in addressing the health emergency.

Instead of deferring once again to former military and police officials, and bureaucrats in the IATF-EID (all of whom are not medical professionals or scientists) to take the leading role, our top health officials this time did not shy away from the spotlight. This time, they made manifest their readiness to take on a bigger responsibility.

The Coordinated Operations to Defeat the Epidemic ( CODE) team, as the DoH plan is called for short, presents a new strategy for battling the coronavirus.

Under the plan, the DoH will shift to a more localized and granular response to the coronavirus pandemic through the activation of the CODE team.

The new battle plan is one of the solutions presented to the group of medical societies that had called for a timeout to recalibrate the country’s Covid-19 response strategy amid the surging number of cases. Following a meeting of the IATF-EID to address the concerns of the doctors and nurses, the DoH said it supported the health care workers’ call for a timeout and would come up with an updated Covid-19 strategy within a week.

Health undersecretary and spokesman Maria Rosario Vergeire explained that the CODE protocol, which was used in the department’s polio vaccination campaign, would enable 1) a health-driven approach to the pandemic through strong engagement between local and community leaders and health care professionals; 2) a needs-based augmentation of resources such as health workers; and 3) multiagency and multistakeholder support.

“This strategy provides stronger support to our local government units who need it the most… We need more efficient ways for localized lockdowns to work,” Vergeire said during a webinar on Wednesday.

“We will not wait for the Covid patients to come to the system, we will find them,” she said.

The CODE team will assess high-risk communities, mobilize stakeholders for action planning, complement resources from the community, implement the plan and monitor the results.

The plan includes a behavioral campaign called “BIDA Solusyon sa Covid-19”; intensified contact tracing in the community; the transfer of probable, suspect and confirmed Covid-19 cases to isolation facilities; expanded testing strategies; and the One Hospital Command system for treating patients.

On Sunday, the government reported 5,032 additional coronavirus infections, the largest single-day increase on record, taking the country’s confirmed cases to 103,185. The DoH also said the country’s coronavirus death toll had jumped by 20 to 2,059.

The Philippines now has the second- highest number of coronavirus infections and Covid-19 deaths in the Southeast Asian region, behind Indonesia.

As Covid- 19 cases continue to rise, a Catholic bishop has echoed the government’s appeal to the public to strictly observe health and safety protocols.

Bishop Roberto Gaa of Novaliches said the government needed all the support it could get from the public in complying with the health protocols such as the wearing of face masks and physical distancing.

The bishop said the government’s efforts would go to naught unless the people “will do their part.”

Well-said, and good plan.