MANILA – There will be “major changes” in the Philippines’ coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic response starting next month with the confirmed cases in the country still rising.
Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said in an interview with CNN Philippines’ The Source yesterday that the changes will focus more on the policies to contain the health crisis and not on the quarantine protocols.
“Let’s just say that things will not be the same. There will be major changes in our response to the pandemic,” Roque said.
“So it is not so much the classification that would matter but the responses,” he added. “The people will now see the difference in the response that we will have. It is now thoroughly invigorated and part of it is the built capacity.”
Roque said that the government will conduct expanded targeted testing and invigorated tracing as the country now have the capability to conduct more actual testing.
“We’ve hit more than 30,000 a day and we will continue to test many people on a daily basis. We will aim to test more and we will invigorate our tracing which is now headed by the tracing czar Mayor (Benjamin) Magalong,” Roque said.
“We now have the capacity to do what we wanted from the very beginning so the people will see that there will be expanded targeted testing beyond numbers that they probably would not have imagined,” he added.
Roque also said more isolation facilities will be constructed for mild and asymptomatic patients and the government will use dormitories if that will not be enough.
“We will actually attempt to isolate everyone who will turn out positive because the experience of other countries is that it is only in this manner that they were able to control the spread of the disease,” Roque said./PN
