Keep MECQ, OCTA urges
The OCTA Research team on Friday asked the national government to maintain the modified enhanced community quarantine (MECQ), the nation’s second strictest quarantine measure, in Metro Manila amid the slight improvement in daily
coronavirus disease (Covid-19) cases.
“We urge the national government, as one possible benchmark for changing quarantine level, to not to exit MECQ until at least the R (reproduction number) of less than 0.9 is sustained,” OCTA Research fellow Fr. Nicanor Austriaco said in a web conference organized by the Cardinal Santos Medical Center.
Austriaco added that the reproduction number in the National Capital Region (NCR) must be aggressively lowered for several weeks in order to decongest the overwhelmed healthcare system.
The reproduction number in the NCR is now at 0.98. He also pointed out that based on their study in all surge scenarios of care, the modeling revealed that the NCR does not have enough nurses to staff 9,745 Covid beds.
“One of the reasons why our hospitals appeared to be so overwhelmed in spite of the extra number of beds that are recorded every single day in the DoH data is because we are actually facing a logjam, the limiting factor is actually not beds but nurses,” he added.
He suggested that the government should hire thousands of new nurses in order to maintain an adequate standard of care for Covid-19 patients in the NCR.
There are reportedly 16,000 nurses in the NCR, based on the data obtained from the Department of Health as of December last year.
He also raised that a Covid-19 patient spent 27 days or almost a month in a hospital, one of the reasons for the congestion.
“The confinement period for a Covid-19 patient who survived is about a month. The reason for the congestion is that patients take a long time before they are allowed to be released,” he said.