‘Covid-19 response a collective failure’
OCTA RESEARCH SAYS
We could have done better. We could have saved more lives. This could have been prevented
The Department of Health (DoH) on Wednesday attempted to downplay Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez’s projection of another Covid-19 surge in July, claiming his statement was taken out of context by the media.
Yet the agency admitted that Tuesday’s number of coronavirus-positive patients — 8,571 that brought the total number of local cases to 884,783 — was just “an artificial decrease” and that it expects to see more victims in the next days.
Still yet, one of the DoH’s private partners in monitoring the spread of the virus — the OCTA Research group composed of professors,
scientists, and mathematicians — has called the government’s response to the latest surge as “a collective failure” that highlighted the country’s “weak public health system”.
“I put the blame on the government,” OCTA Research fellow Prof. Ranjit Rye told ANC. “This surge is a big thing, there’s no going around it. We failed here.”
Rye said the government should have imposed a strict lockdown earlier when the cases were within the manageable “1,000 or 2000 cases”.
“We could have done better. We could have saved more lives. This could have been prevented,” Rye stated.
The government, however, only tightened the restrictions in Metro Manila and four adjacent provinces — Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, and Rizal — on 29 March to 11 April, but not before the number of victims spiked to an average of almost 10,000 cases a day.
Daily Tribune asked presidential spokesperson Secretary Harry Roque to comment on Rye’s statement. His reply was: “(I) defer to DoH”.
In a later message, Roque shared Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergerie’s statement, that said: “The escalation and de-escalation of community quarantine status are based on pre-set gatekeeping indicators, specifically the Average Daily Attack Rate (ADAR) and 2-week growth rate (2WGR) and HCUR. These indicators undergo regular assessment by the Sub-TWG on Data Analytics composed of experts from different sectors.”
“At that time, the situation in NCR did not merit an escalation but we were already raising the alarm as the trend continued to increase.”
“The DoH met with Metro Manila Mayors as early as 24 February to discuss possible measures to contain the spread of cases, with the detection of variants and observed clustering of cases in NCR, hence the implementation of localized lockdowns in several areas in Metro Manila.”
“Prior to the implementation of ECQ in the National Capital Region and neighboring areas, it can be recalled that NCR implemented GCQ (general community quarantine) with enhanced PDITR/ additional measures and had imposed granular lockdowns in several barangays in NCR due to observed upticks in Covid-19 cases. Over the course of the following weeks, the DoH was in close and constant coordination with the concerned local government units to implement measures to mitigate further spread.”
The group blamed the country’s overwhelmed healthcare system and the presence of more transmissible and more lethal variants of the virus that also affects the senior citizens.
“However, considering the porosity of borders in Metro Manila where people are free to move between cities, we recognized that it was only a matter of time before the cases spread to other cities. Hence, as you remember, a bubble was imposed in NCR+, or Metro Manila and its neighboring regions to ensure that the observed increase in cases did not spill over to other regions.”
“With the actions that we initiated during the ECQ, and with the immediate and long-term targets and strategies we have set, we will decongest our hospitals, permanently increase our health system capacity, and institutionalize our PDITR strategies in our local government units while effectively monitor its implementation so we would no longer have to choose between health and economy. We can only do this through our collective efforts. Now is the time for all of us to use our energy and expertise to help this nation address the surge we are facing.”
The enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) was lifted in place of the modified enhanced community (MECQ) on 12 April and will last until the end of the month, but Galvez on Tuesday said he does not expect a break in the surge.
“We’re still in the middle of a surge. There’s so much more hard work that needs to be done. We have to be careful. We have to be vigilant,” Rye also said.
‘Twas almost exactly what Galvez’s message when he warned the public against another surge in the number of victims, especially since the OCTA also reported an increase in the Covid-19 fatalities.
In the past two weeks, the National Capital Region (NCR) — the epicenter of the virus spread — has recorded an increase in case fatality rate from 1.82 percent on 1 to 27 March to 5.36 percent at present.
The group blamed the country’s overwhelmed healthcare system and the presence of more transmissible and more lethal variants of the virus that also affects the senior citizens. From 11.8 percent case fertility rate in the same period, deaths to persons aged 65-years-old and above were at 28.6 percent at present.
“With a recent increase in case fertility rate to nearly 3 out of 10 Covid-19 cases, seniors should be given priority to healthcare access to be assured of timely interventions,” the group said.
There were 137 Covid-19 deaths on Tuesday.
The DoH also warned that Tuesday’s drop in the number of cases was an artificial decrease, saying most of the laboratories that test for Covid-19 are closed on weekends, thus the fewer results reported.
“This is just artificial. It is not true that the cases are declining,” Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire emphasized.
“We’ll see the effect of (the) ECQ about 10 to 14 days from now,” she added.