EVEN during Holy Week, there is no going around our current crosses – surging cases of COVID-19 and the national government’s inability to get its act together.
The country’s testing and contact tracing capability ppears to have been bungled big-time. Look at the wave of new infections. The National Task Force on COVID-19 must be shaken mightily to wake up from its stupor. It failed to expand testing in the last six months.
We have reached this point today because of this failure. Our coffers will be P23-billion less in the next few days because we have failed to breach 50,000 tests per day. This is money that could have been better spent for vaccine procurement.
The last time the country has breached the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended 10 percent positive rate was Sept. 20, 2020, at 10.40 percent with 3,646 cases.
On March 15, 2021, this was breached again, at 10.30 percent with 4,161 cases. As of March 24, 2021, we have failed to raise our testing capacity past 0.43 tests per thousand people. In the space of six months, our testing capacity has plateaued, this is absolutely unacceptable.
The country fared worse in comparison to our neighbors in Southeast Asia. In the same period, Malaysia was able to raise its daily testing capacity by a factor of 4.28, at 1.37 tests per thousand people. Worse, Malaysia and the Philippines had similar testing figures in September 2020.
Indonesia was able to almost double its testing capacity, while Thailand managed to triple its rate.
We only increased our capacity by 34.38 percent. These are the unassailable metrics of failure in one of the most important pillars of our coronavirus response.
This failure in expanding testing over the course of six months has resulted in the situation we find ourselves in today.
This is not just because of our limited vaccine supply. This is not just because of coronavirus mutations.
Why is Vietnam able to control COVID-19? Why is Taiwan able to control it? That is because from the very start, they are able to do the correct process. The original sin is when we did not close our borders to Chinese tourists. Taiwan, in January or February 2020, closed the flights right away and Vietnam did the same. But we did not do so because, as what Health secretary Francisco Duque said, it might displease China. We are sorry to point this out but pleasing China resulted in 13,000 deaths, pleasing China resulted in 700,000 cases in our jurisdiction.
