Medical frontlines who call for timeout are not enemies

On Rody Duterte's bidding, government's pandemic task force is to convene today. Agenda: the healthcare frontlines' plea last Saturday for timeout to reassess strategies. That's the proper reply to doctors, nurses and med-techs overwhelmed by the coronavirus onslaught.

The presidential spokesman's earlier instant brushoff of their suggestion of stricter capital region quarantine was deemed antipathetic. "Community quarantine alone, we repeat, is an insufficient response in controlling COVID-19," the lawyer said hours before Duterte's directive. "The strict lockdown in Metro Manila has served its purpose; we need to intensify other strategies." Most hurtful, going by their social media ripostes, was a senadora's dismissive "they should just do their jobs better."

Medical workers are not enemies. They are professionals who wish to be of better service. Nor are the people pests who peskily scurry out of rat holes for food, oblivious of COVID-19 precautions. They need to earn a living, to not depend on national and local officials' occasional "ayuda". Enough please of admin apologists' circle-the-wagons attitude against those with differing views from theirs. Treating University of the Philippines statisticians and data analysts as rivals for aptly forecasting spikes in infections was divisive. Be thankful instead that they showed how the world's longest running country lockdown to date is yielding meager results. Removing a "special (medical) adviser" to the National Action Task Force for candidness was petty. That public health advocate, Dr. Tony Leachon, when sought by Duterte weeks later for expertise, counseled to give free facemasks to slum dwellers. Enough too of talking down to the poor as "pasaway" (stubborn) for straying out of shanties. Everyday they are balancing the peril to homes with the need to go out for food for the family. They're cramped, hungry, and have no indoor plumbing for frequent hand-washing, no space for safe distancing, no spare room for preventive self-isolating. Packing them into police vans and then jails only increases the risks of contagion.

The Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases consists mostly of retired generals. They may be adept in containment of humans but not of virus. Still they know what to do when their frontlines suffer battle fatigue and demoralization. They give them rest, reinforcements, and reassurance. Hopefully those will come today.

Not propagandists, those generals acknowledge battlefield situations. COVID wards in most Mega Manila hospitals are full; intensive care units are past the 70-percent critical level. Daily infections have doubled, now 4,000-5,000 per day. The sudden reclassification of 38,000 mild infectees one day last week as "recovered" could have been better explained, to avoid frontline and public suspicion of data manipulation.

"You can't hide the numbers," infectious disease specialist and clinical pharmacologist Dr. Benjamin Co wrote. "The National Capital Region contributed 43% of the total number of new cases" last Friday. (Read more: https://news.abs-cbn.com/ancx/culture/spotlight/07/30/20/the-philippines-record-single-day-tally-of-3954-brings-it-past-kazahkstan-in-the-global-total-covid-case-race) Another expert added, why not give weekly in lieu of daily Dept. of Health reports on new cases and deaths? "They're four to eight days delayed anyway, making the daily reports look misleading," Dr. Susan Pineda Mercado, special envoy for global health initiatives-Dept. of Foreign Affairs, told Sapol radio show Saturday. "So long as figures are accurate, officials can still plot if they're winning or losing." Healthcare workers are being downed by the virus. Some private hospitals are laying off employees due to slow PhilHealth reimbursements of patient treatments. Public hospitals are slow to recruit additional staff, or to indemnify COVID-stricken medics, and amply protect them from sickness, laments Sen. Christopher Go, health committee chairman.

Doctors are best in diagnoses and prognoses. The proposal of 40 medical associations for a two-week regional lockdown is based on their specializations. To lecture them about the effect on the economy is silly. They care about lives; it's insulting to tell them that people will die of hunger in another stay-home imposition. That's for government to solve, if ever.

Filipinos can be mobilized to help one another. Well-off neighborhoods can adopt slums during the two weeks, if they haven't yet since the start of lockdown in Mar. In supporting the doctors by again closing churches in Manila till Aug. 14, Catholic Bishop Broderick Pabillo said: "We all suffer from this pandemic economically. However, there are many families who are more badly impacted than others. So we appeal for generosity. Let us give whatever we can, however little it may be, so that no one may suffer the pangs of hunger." Other bishops and pastors expounded on yesterday's Sunday Mass gospel on Jesus feeding the multitudes. If government is immobilized, then officials need to at least trust the people to do right. For that matter, politicos would do well by refraining from demonizing business conglomerates, that give aid by the hundreds of millions of pesos, as "greedy oligarchs". And that such "filthy rich firms" should be disenfranchised even without due process of law. That's the same line of communist rebels. If politicos share that ideology, then why don't they just combine the Armed Forces of the Philippines with the New People's Army to topple the present order?

Back to healthcare workers, listen to them at least. This is the first time they're groaning in unison since "World War C" engulfed the Philippines in Jan.

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Catch Sapol radio show, Saturdays, 8 to 10 a.m., DWIZ (882-AM).

My book "Exposés: Investigative Reporting for Clean Government" is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Expos%C3%A9s-Investigative-Reporting-Clean-Government-ebook/dp/B00EPX01BG

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