MANILA, Philippines – There will be “major changes” in the government’s reaction to the coronavirus pandemic, according to presidential spokesman Harry Roque, who said Wednesday that the country is unlikely to exceed this time the expert predictions of 85,000 COVID-19 cases over the end of the month.
“Let’s say things may not be the same. There will be primary adjustments to our pandemic reaction,” Roque said in a television interview.
But Roque said the Manila metropolitan area, which has the most COVID-19 cases, will serve as a floor for government action.
“Metro Manila will be a living delight and it’s a delight in what we think we can succeed, and it will be anything we can be proud of,” he said.
In the past, experts had placed Metro Manila under the network’s tightly improved quarantine amid the growing number of COVID-19 cases, but the president was persuaded to keep the Capital Region under a lighter network quarantine.
Roque said the new measures to be implemented will come with extensive specific testing and group testing, which may be only the charge of a P300 swab test, as well as the provision of more quarantine and isolation centers.
“The people will now see the difference in the response that we will have, it is now thoroughly invigorated and part of it is we build capacity and we now have the capacity to do what we wanted from the very beginning,” he said.
The country can conduct 30,000 tests a day, but the government aims to increase the number of other people testing them through PCR (chain reaction through polymer, which have been approved in principle, Roque said.
If the verification is positive, the pool user will be re-checked to determine which of them has the disease.
Roque said this would reduce the PCR verification charge to around three hundred P, according to consistent values, as a PCR control costs around 300 P on average.
“This is that you can use a verification kit to check 10 to 20 [people],” he said.
With the controls clustered, the country can simply control thousands of people a day, he added.
Roque described the grouped evidence as a “game changer” that would allow the government to isolate more COVID-19 patients.
As for the isolation of the patients, Roque stated that the giant detoxification center in The province of Nueva Ecija, as well as the school dormitories, can be used as quarantines.
“Now you will see that [the] [will] get more and more insulation facilities. We hope to build around a thousand insulation facilities.
If that’s not enough, we’ll make e-books in dormitories, school dorms. School [is] out. We will really try to isolate all those who will be positive, because the delight of other countries is that only in this way have they been able to control the spread of the disease,” he said.
Only patients who have their own bedrooms and bathrooms will be able to isolate themselves at home, he said.
“I hope we do it like Thailand and Vietnam, until the third degree of tracking,” he added.
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