In the government’s new strategy against COVID-19, people will feel the presence of the Department of Health (DOH) at the local level, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said on Wednesday, August 5.

Vergeire made the statement in a virtual briefing on Wednesday, when asked for the country’s coronavirus response in the next two weeks, or while Mega Manila is on modified lockdown.

“What would be different for this new strategy that we’re now going to employ would be we’re going on the ground; we’re going to go at the [level of the] local government units (LGU), at the local levels where we would want people to feel that DOH is there,” she said.

“We are not going to wait for the patients to go to us. This time, the DOH plus the whole of government, society will be engaged so we will be able to go to the patients, to go to each house, to check for symptoms, to check if people have been exposed, and to provide the necessary interventions,” she added.

In her presentation, Vergeire said that the DOH and the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) will do “house-to-house case finding.”

‘More empowered’ LGUs

Vergeire said the goal of the new strategy is for LGUs to be “more empowered” so they can be more capable of responding to the health crisis.

“In the next two weeks, people would see that we’re going to prime the system. We’re going to prime the processes whereby the national government helps local governments,” Vergeire said, adding that the new government strategy will be presented to the public by August 8.

To effectively curb the spread of the virus in clusters of infections, Vergeire said the government will implement the CODE (Coordinated Operations to Defeat Epidemic) protocol.

Vergeire said the CODE protocol aims to operationalize “government-enabled approach, local government-led, people-centered response, with health taking the primacy in the approach.”

The DOH said on Tuesday that it sat down for the first of a series of meetings with over 100 medical organizations to discuss strategies to strengthen the Philippine pandemic plan. 

The government formed its new strategy following the “distress call” of the medical community for the government to revert Mega Manila to modified enhanced community quarantine for two weeks, and during that time, revisit its pandemic response. (READ: Duterte gov’t, medical societies meet to recalibrate PH pandemic response)

President Rodrigo Duterte reverted Metro Manila and nearby provinces to to a stricter MECQ from August 4 until August 18, following the call.

The medical community earlier made the plea after it warned that the country was “losing” the battle against COVID-19, and proposed several measures to government.

Health officials said on Monday, August 3, that they were monitoring 887 clusters nationwide. Of these clusters, 315 are in Metro Manila, the epicenter of the outbreak. 

As of Tuesday, the Philippines recorded 112,593 cases of COVID-19, including 2,115 deaths and 66,049 recoveries. Of the total cases, 44,429 were active cases. – Rappler.com