ILOILO City – Extending the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) in this city, Iloilo province and elsewhere would amount to nothing without mass testing for possible coronavirus disease 2019 (COVI-19) infection, warned a cause-oriented group.
Bearing in mind that testing is the basis of public health detective work to shut down an epidemic, local chief executives should consider combining mass testing with selective ECQ to balance public health concerns with economic impact to people, according to Elmer Forro, secretary general of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan-Panay (Bayan Panay).
This city’s Mayor Jerry Treñas announced extending the ECQ – which is supposed to end on
April 14 – here until April 30.
The provincial government of Iloilo is inclined to also do the same, and other provincial governments in Panay Island to follow suit.
Treñas, however, has also been urging the Department of Health (DOH) Region 6 to conduct mass testing.
“We reiterate our support for immediate mass testing of PUIs (patients under investigation), PUMs (persons under monitoring) and all frontliners, especially health workers. We stand by the advice of world medical experts and the best practices of South Korea and China in flattening the curve of the pandemic – that mass testing is the game changer in order to separate those afflicted by COVID-19 from the healthy population and proper medical attention given to those who are sick,” said Forro.
Without mass testing, his group believes the importance of ECQ’s role in cutting the chain of virus infection has been blown out of proportion.
“Speed is of the essence, and three things are crucial: tracking down cases with symptoms; identifying their household cluster and tracing people they’ve contacted; and quarantining them until they are no longer infectious,” Forro stressed.
”You can’t fight a virus if you don’t know where it is,” said the WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, recently. “Find, isolate, test and treat every case, to break the chains of transmission. Every case we find and treat limits the expansion of the disease.”/PN
Totally agreed. No mass testing means nothing. It’s just the extension of suffering for poor people. Can the mayor consider to free the districts without confirmed cases ASAP? Hunger is more horrible than Virus.
More lockdown, more ppl will die from lack of income and from hunger.
Ppl will commit suicides. And ppl will develop psychological illnesses and mental illnesses. Are these trade offs for the lockdown worth it?
In any case the politicians are the ones to be scared of dying because they are the most vulnerable ones, not most of the normal healthy ppl.