BY MATÈ ESPINA
COVID-19 cases continue to rise in Bacolod City and Negros Occidental and it seems there is no sign of it lowering down based on the high positivity rate of testing results which is between 30-40 percent, according to Dr. Julius Drilon, the medical director of the Corazon Locsin Montelibano Memorial Regional Hospital (CLMMRH).
Over the weekend alone, Negros Occidental had a total of 310 new cases while Bacolod City had 256 new ones. Based on the results from the CLMMRH molecular lab, one out of three persons they test is positive.
What is even scarier is the fact that the number of asymptomatic patients are also much lower at 60 percent compared to last year’s surge, ergo, we now have a higher number of positives that need to be treated in health facilities.
And believe me, getting a room in any of the hospitals here is a big problem. I should know as we experienced this recently with our brother, Nonoy, who tested positive for the virus. We were just lucky that in the nick of time, there was an available bed at CLMMRH and he was admitted under critical care.
Another friend got lucky as well that on the third day after his test came out, a bed became available and he was admitted. It was a good thing they had oxygen at home but without it, his 02 was at 87 (anything below 95 is dangerous) and again, in the nick of time, a bed was freed up in a hospital here.
But what about those who were not able to get in the nick of time?
I interviewed Dr. Drilon yesterday and having 20 COVID-related deaths per month is really bad. This is not surprising since five percent of the positives now fall into moderate to severe cases and right now, we have over 2,200 active cases in Bacolod alone. Do the math.
He said the trend is still increasing and until drastic changes will be implemented, the figures will continue to climb. Drilon explained that at the beginning of this month, we were averaging 90-100 positive cases each day. Second week, it increased to 130-160 daily positives. We are on the third week now and the numbers remain the same.
There are a lot of factors like poor enforcement of health protocols, poor contact tracing, lack of cooperation from the people and lack of information update from the city government which should trickle down to the purok level.
This is really sad because two months spent here by Gen. Mel Feliciano and the WHO, to set up proper monitoring, contact tracing and immediate isolation last year, have gone to naught.
“They must take out the political component from the pandemic so it will not muddle how our leaders look at the situation because while politics and pandemic both starts with ‘P’, they must not mix,” he added.
Quoting Albert Einstein, “If you are using the same formula and expect different results, then you are a fool” for clearly, if the trend is not reversing then the present strategy is not working.
There are tools that the city government can adapt such as the granular or segmental lockdowns when necessary as this may be the only measure that will abate the spread. But this, of course, has to be well enforced by the barangays and ably assisted by the city, Drilon added.
And I see his point because even before we were locked down, on the way to the swabbing center, we saw people congregating without face masks. One may say it’s COVID-fatigue but the city needs to make the people understand that “our health facilities are getting overwhelmed.”
Worse, PhilHealth has a standing bill of over P320 million to CLMMRH which is the lone public hospital serving Bacolod. Drilon said 67 percent of their income is from PhilHealth but “we only got 1.2 percent pay-out from Covid claims since June of last year.”
“We can hardly cope up and we have been implementing alternatives because we cannot tell the public we will stop working. But we are really having a hard time balancing the needs of the hospital from supplies, medicines, the PPEs, salaries, etc,” Drilon said.
Stock level must be one month of supply back-up, he said. But every week, “we are doing an inventory of basic supply” to ensure they are equipped to deal with the cases. Not to mention taking care of the well-being of their personnel. At the moment, 40 workers of CLMMRH are not reporting for work due to quarantine. From the start of the year, over 150 personnel have contracted the virus and Drilon is just thankful that they have not lost a worker yet.
We expected this already since early this year and we have plans to address such. “But we need to have additional human resource as we cannot overstretch our staff, plus the budget, which unfortunately we do not have.”
We are on the second wave. I asked Drilon whether he thinks we can even survive a third wave and he bluntly replied, “I don’t think we can even survive this wave if there are no changes.” He added however that it’s been worth the fight and “we continue to try to accommodate everybody because to us, all lives matter.”
Call him fatalistic. But if you look at the trend and the lack of resources and support from the national government, the local government and the people themselves, the truth may not be far behind./PN
