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Filipino health workers dying due to COVID-19 ‘worrisome’ —WHO


The World Health Organization (WHO) expressed concern over the “worrisome” number of Filipino health workers dying due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) compared to the rest of the Western Pacific region.

According to Tina Panganiban-Perez’s Wednesday report on “24 Oras,” Dr. Abdi Mahamud, the WHO-Western Pacific region COVID-19 incident manager, said the rate of Filipino medical workers succumbing to the illness was at least four times more than the average in other countries.

“The worrisome trend we have seen in the Philippines, the percentage of 13 percent is as I have mentioned is worrisome. In our region, overall it is around 2 to 3 percent where countries like South Korea, Australia and Japan have low percentages,” Mahamud said.

The Department of Health earlier reported that a total of 1,062 Filipino health workers had been infected with COVID-19, which is 12 percent of the country’s total cases.

The Philippines’ 12 percent is higher than China’s 4 percent, the DOH added.

Of the 1,062, 422 are doctors, 386 are nurses, 30 are medical technologists, 21 are radiologic technologists, 51 are nursing assistants, while 152 are considered “health frontliners” or barangay health workers and people who are part of the administrative workforce.

Meanwhile, a total of 26 health workers have already succumbed to the respiratory illness.

The DOH said the high number of infections may be attributed to the shortage of personal protective equipment.

Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said the country’s medical workers need 122,000 up to 130,000 PPEs per day.

Moreover, Dr. Gerardo Legaspi, director of the University of the Philippines-Philippine General Hospital, said PPEs should be of medical grade to provide adequate protection to health workers.

Legaspi said PPEs donated by various manufacturers were not all of medical grade.

“When we started going out to the wards, we got all kinds of PPEs from well-meaning dressmakers and neighborhood sewers and we saw that this could have put our frontliners in the falseness of security because not all of them are medical grade,” he said.

Due to the global shortage of PPEs, the Department of Trade and Industry asked the Confederation of Wearable Exporters of the Philippines (CONWEP) to supply frontliners with medical grade gear.

Earlier, the DOH said CONWEP already turned over 10,000 pieces of medical grade cover-alls out of the 300,000 it promised.

Meanwhile, a private company donated 15,000 pieces of N95 masks.

“This collaboration by the government and the private sector aims to develop our country’s capacity to produce medical grade PPEs. This will also meet our demands for these vital medical supplies throughout the pandemic and beyond,” Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez said.

Currently, the DOH has 120,000 stocks of cover-alls and 200,000 PPEs.

The agency also ordered additional 900,000 PPEs, while the DTI will get 74,000 more.

With these donations, the DOH is optimistic that the number of health workers affected by the virus will lessen in the coming days.

The country has so far confirmed a total of 6,710 cases of COVID-19 with 446 fatalities and 693 recoveries. —Ma. Angelica Garcia/LDF, GMA News

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