AN official of the Department of Health (DOH) disputed on Monday a statement issued by the Healthcare Professionals Alliance Against Covid-19 (HPAAC) that the two-week enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) had “gone to waste.”
“I cannot say really, hindi ko masasang-ayunan ang HPAAC dito na sinasabi nilang [I cannot agree with what HPAAC has been saying] it has ‘gone to waste’ because we have implemented measures,” Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said in a media forum on Monday.
Not only that measures were implemented, Vergeire said, but the government had even expanded the bed capacity of hospitals and treatment centers for Covid-19.
“We have also mobilized our local government units,” she added.
Vergeire also reiterated that the effects of the ECQ will be felt in the next “10 to 14 days.”
The HPAAC on Sunday urged the government to save the nation from the continuous “suffering” and warned that if their demands would still be ignored, the country will remain in the “vicious cycle” wherein “the sick will die unattended, the people will continue to face hunger, and the economy will plummet into further recession.”
In a statement, the HPAAC has expressed alarm over the “critical bottlenecks to long-term solutions have not been addressed, and necessary changes to systems and processes have yet to be implemented.”
These bottlenecks, they said, that “have yet to be acknowledged” with the same sense of urgency currently experienced by their colleagues in every “congested” emergency department.
The group also reemphasized that the mobility restriction is but a “short-term intervention, and yet it seems to have been wasted again.”
“The government still has no clear plans and efforts to fix the root causes, and the nation continues to suffer because of this. This ECQ may have slowed down the spread, but the numbers are still perilously high,” the group pointed out.
Covid cases
A total of 11,378 additional Covid-19 cases were logged on as of 4 p.m. of April 12. The total number of infections stood at 876,225.
There were also 267 recoveries and 204 deaths.
Of the total number of cases, 18.0 percent (157,451) are active cases, 80.3 percent (703,625) have recovered, and 1.73 percent (15,149) perished.
Moreover, 34 cases that were previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after final validation.
Six laboratories were not able to submit their data to the Covid-19 Document Repository System on April 11, 2021.
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