Roque: Gov't COVID-19 response is not like that of Yolanda

Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque maintained Monday that the government’s COVID-19 response is and will not be disastrous amid hospital shortage and surge in COVID-19 cases more than a year into the pandemic.

Roque was responding to the comments made by Dr. Aileen Espina—the national director of the Philippine Academy of Family Physicians and member of the Healthcare Professionals Alliance Against COVID-19.

Espina said:“Di ko po mapigilan na 'yung mga nakikita kong kahinaan sa sistema are the very same things na nakita ko noong Yolanda. At least 'yung Yolanda noon sa'min sa Tacloban after 5 hours tapos na siya. Ito, isang taon na paulit-ulit na...bababa 'yung kaso, magrerelax tayo hindi natin inaayos 'yung root cause ng pagdami ng kaso."

(The weaknesses in the system are the very same things I saw during typhoon Yolanda in 2013. At least Yolanda was over in five hours. This has been ongoing for a year, cases will go down, we relax, without addressing the root cause of the surge.)

“Huwag na po nating ibalik ang kalansay ng Liberal Party na Yolanda. Disaster po iyan. Hindi po natin ibabalik ang disastrous government response na iyan,” Roque said in a Palace briefing.

(Let us not bring back the skeletons of the Liberal Party that is Yolanda. That is a disaster. We won’t go back with such disastrous government response.)

Health Undersecretary Leopoldo “Bong” Vega, for his part, said that the two-week long enhanced community quarantine in Metro Manila and adjacent provinces Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, and Rizal—dubbed as NCR Plus—enabled the public and private hospitals to set aside over 1,000 additional beds for COVID-19 patients.

Vega said that of the 1,042 COVID-19 beds in  public and private hospitals, 960 are in the National Center for Mental Health while the 142 are beds under Intensive Care Unit setting.

“This is a big increase,” Vega said during the Palace briefing.

“From 75% health care utilization rate in the National Capital Region, it could go down to 58% which is a low risk category,” Vega added.

Metro Manila and adjacent provinces Bulacan, Cavite, Rizal, and Laguna have been placed under enhanced community quarantine from March 29 to April 11 to mainly decongest the hospitals already overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases, with a good number of patients even waiting under tents pending availability of a hospital room.

Vega said that on top of 1,042 new hospital beds for COVID-19 patients, the opening of the modular hospital in Quezon Institute and the scheduled opening of another isolation facility in The Manila Times College Subic property equipped with 250 beds this week should also further decongest the country’s health care facilities.

The Philippines has 157,451 active COVID-19 cases as of April 12. In addition, 15,149 died.

Of this number, at least 58,000 new COVID-19 cases were recorded in Metro Manila alone in the last two weeks.—AOL, GMA News