Poor contact tracing in March – Magalong

MANILA, Philippines — There was no effective contact tracing done in March when the nation saw an unprecedented surge in coronavirus infections, a key government official told a House panel hearing last Tuesday.

Contact tracing czar and Baguio City Mayor Benjamin Magalong admitted as much when he briefed the House committee on health’s virtual hearing on the failure of the government’s contact tracing efforts this past month.

“For the past four weeks, you can see that contact tracing largely deteriorated. Only members of the household are being contact-traced. So, technically, there’s no contact tracing,” Magalong told the committee.

The Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) has long called on local governments units (LGUs) to step up their contact tracing program, a crucial aspect in curbing the spread of COVID-19.

Magalong lamented how many LGUs failed in this function, when they should have coordinated contact tracing efforts with the police and military under the system already in place.

“We have many local government units that are not using their data collection tool despite the fact that we have already shared this with them and we have uploaded this in their computers, laptops during their actual training. They’re still not using it,” he told the committee.

Data he presented to lawmakers showed the ratio of contact tracing efficiency nationwide went down from an average of 1:7 early this year to 1:3 in March, when the new active cases breached the 10,000 mark.

Magalong said this means contact tracing was limited to a coronavirus-positive patient’s household and no one else. This is not the principle of contact tracing, he said.

He said IATF could only fix this problem by conducting a retraining on contact tracing for LGUs and support them in the analysis of their COVID-19 cases.

At present, the government is training contact tracers within the National Capital Region (NCR)-Plus bubble, as well as in Regions 5 and 12.

In Mandaluyong City, Mayor Menchie Abalos ordered a 24/7 contact tracing operation to contain the spread of the virus.

In an executive order released Tuesday, Abalos tasked the city epidemiology and surveillance unit and other local government offices involved in contact tracing to step up its operations round-the-clock.

She cited the need for an integrated disease surveillance and response system to reduce “morbidity, mortality and disability” caused by communicable diseases and other conditions in the city, which recorded at least 149 new COVID-19 cases on that day. Active cases were at 1,024.

Back in the House, Magalong said the IATF was also working on issues with the StaySafe contact tracing mobile application, which is supposed to be the unified and centralized system used nationwide.

The Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) has repeatedly appealed to LGUs and the general public to use the StaySafe app for a “consistent and unified” digital contact tracing.

The DILG aims to reach at least 50 million users and connect all 1,634 city and municipal local governments across the country to make the contact tracing app effective.

Basically, the StaySafe app will send a notification if you have been exposed to a person infected with the virus in the past days made through digital identifiers received by phone via Bluetooth’s 100-meter range. – Neil Jayson Servallos