“Testing remains as the vital link to the rest of the public health strategies of contact tracing and isolation, in order to truly mitigate the spread of more infectious variants like Omicron in communities.”
Assuming that the areas under granular lockdown are identified as potential sources of infection, what interventions are being done to ensure the risk of transmission is mitigated or even bring down infections? How are tracing and testing protocols being implemented? In the case of indoor establishments and workplaces, what engineering and administrative controls are in place? In the context of airborne transmission of COVID-19, disinfections are simply not enough.
With the government’s inability to control the rise of COVID-19 cases in the country, community health advocates are up in arms over the government’s response that, for the last 500 or so days, mainly resorted to stricter lockdowns.
To identify close contacts up to third or fourth degree, community health advocates said that contact tracing has to rely on an already robust public health system which the Philippines does not have in the first place.
“We cannot accept the Court’s reasoning that it is barred from compelling the executive to protect the people’s right to health ‘in a certain way or to a certain degree’ and ‘no matter how dire the emergency’ when it is obvious that the current response is a huge failure and places our people’s health and safety in peril.”
So, how does this contact tracing really happen? In my case, wala (none). It didn’t happen. I hope this is an isolated case but if this is the norm in most cases, gets ko yung sinasabi ng matanda na we just wait for a vaccine. For the meantime, use gasoline to clean your face masks but do not add fuel to the fire.
With the cases increasing, concerned government agencies are swamped with backlogs, particularly on validating COVID-19 cases and an overwhelmed public health system.