MANILA (Reuters) – Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Saturday ordered his working group on coronavirus to address the considerations of more than one million doctors and nurses who have called for the resumption of strict closures after a record third day of infections.
But the government has questioned the call for frontline fitness to revive the strict closures of the populated domain in and around the capital Manila.
In the largest call to date from medical experts to involve the virus, 80 teams representing 80,000 doctors and one million nurses said the Philippines wasted the fight opposed to COVID-19 and warned of a collapse in the fitness formula due to the outbreak of infections without tighter controls.
“Our fitness is exhausted due to a probably infinite number of patients who go to our hospitals for emergency care and admission,” the group said, led through the Philippine College of Physicians, in a letter to the president, as the Southeast Asian country recorded 4,963 coronavirus infections.
“We are waging a war opposed to COVID-19,” he said.
Health workers, as well as microbiologists, infectious diseases and public fitness specialists, pediatricians and nurses, have called for a two-week closure in Manila and the southern provinces of Manila until mid-August.
Duterte ordered an inter-agency panel to “act on those concerns,” the presidential palace said. “Their voices have been heard,” Duterte spokesman Harry Roque said in a statement.
But Commerce Secretary Ramón López said the capital and neighboring provinces cannot return to the blockade, as other people “must drive and live with the virus, which came to stay,” and that there are other tactics to prevent its spread. .
Roque said the government is striking a “delicate act of balancing the public aptitude and economic fitness of the nation.”
In mid-March, Duterte imposed one of the world’s longest and strictest closures in the capital and provinces to combat the virus.
In an effort to revive the economy, restrictions eased in June, allowing for a freer movement of others and the reopening of some companies. But infections have since quintupled to 98,232, and deaths have more than doubled to 2,039.
Manila and neighboring provinces account for two-thirds of the Philippine economy, among Asia’s top dynamics before the pandemic.
Reports by Neil Jerome Morales; Edited through William Mallard
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