By Analou De Vera
The Philippine government should prepare its whole health system for the possibility of a community-wide transmission of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as it may happen in any parts of the country, the World Health Organization (WHO) said.
“Based on the scale of community wide transmission, we are encouraging the Philippines to prepare itself to manage that number of possible patients if you have community wide transmission. What we have learned from this outbreak so far and what we are telling the government of the Philippines as they prepare for contingency plans is that community wide transmission may happen in any city,” said WHO Country Representative to the Philippines Dr. Rabindra Abeyasinghe.
“If you look at the experiences of Korea, Italy, or Iran, they did not start in the capital. You need to prepare your whole health system and your whole of government because you wouldn’t [know] where the transmission would start,” he added.
In case the community wide transmission happens, the government should shift its efforts from “containment to mitigation,” said Abeyasinghe.
“So that will be a fundamental shift. We will no longer be spending our efforts trying to contain it because it’s transmitting freely in the community. Our focus would be protecting the health workers who need to care for the sick and protecting the most vulnerable groups,” explained Abeyasinghe.
“Our assessment of this disease so far indicates that largely it’s a mild disease — about 81 percent will have mild disease — many of them could be managed as outpatients. But, 14 percent will develop severe disease and five percent will progress to critical, meaning they will need intensive care facilities. So this is what we are concerned about because among that five percent will largely be elderly subjects having underlying medical conditions,” he added.
‘OUTBREAK CAN BE CONTAINED’
Abeyasinge said that the WHO believed that the COVID-19 outbreak can be contained, although the global risk assessment of the infection was raised to “very high.”
“The positive evidence from many countries, including here in the Philippines, which our Director-General acknowledge, have shown that countries implementing good containment measures can contain and reverse the trend of this disease,” he said.
“We are still advocating for countries to invest in containment measures while they prepare for community wide transmission. We are now seeing several large clusters affecting countries outside of China namely South Korea, Iran, and Italy. But even in these countries–what we are seeing is localized transmission and we still believed that even in these countries the trend could be reversed,” he added.
Abeyasinghe said that it is necessary for the Philippine government to further strengthen its entry screening procedures.
“Thermal body scanning, looking and getting travel histories, all of that will help to contain and minimize possible entry of the virus,” he said.
The WHO official, meanwhile, said that the Philippines has implemented “relatively successful containment measures” including implementing travel bans.
