Lobaton: IATF’s belated response

Lobaton: IATF’s belated response

I CAN'T understand where the Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID) is basing its reports why it surprisingly classified Bacolod City on Alert Level 4. The data showed that for the past two weeks, there is already a downtrend of new cases of Covid-19 in the city.

The City Government invoked this, including the hospital utilization rate.

I remember I have attributed two of my columns asking what interventions the health authorities are doing at the height of the surge. I even said that the situation was already a failure of the health system if there is still a system because people have no way to go than sacrifice their lives to Covid-19.

I raised that under the present situation, the government cannot be helpless with its health system because people do have high trust supposedly for their institutions to save them.

The hospitals simply released advisories that they could not accept patients, particularly those infected with Covid-19.

What is worse is that while we have taken the respite from the continuing surge, we haven’t heard whether hospitals have normalized the situations and they could accept admissions.

Based on reports of the Department of Health (DOH)-Western Visayas, the recent surge happened at the start of the third week of September until the second week of October. These days, the city has a triple-digit number of new cases from the local transmission.

There was a time on October 1, Bacolod registered 228 new cases in a day. For the rest until October 20, the city maintained more than a hundred new cases every day. Until this writing, the number of new cases is low, and based on the appeal of the City Government, hospital admissions are now available, though we have not heard official announcements from hospitals.

This is the quality of response the health authorities are having in this uncertain situation. It could be misplaced or belated, that should have been done during the exact surge and people need it the most.

The IATF should have prevented the loss of lives with the raising of alert levels along with the warnings that we are on the surge. We could have helped in saving lives, particularly the elderly and those with comorbidities who are favorite victims of Covid-19.

Now that we have a decline in the number of new cases, we should maintain the figures. The people should always be reminded that all this is not yet over. But raising the alert level as high as the one stipulated in the IATF Resolution 146-A for Bacolod City is something out of touch or probably a very early response for the coming surge.

Someone in the academe said while people mourn and have not moved on from the death of a relative, another relative has fallen as a victim of the dreaded disease. There should have been a better way to approach the situation than just getting the report on figures about the cases and the number of deaths.

Surprisingly, the Covid-19, on its own, felt the shame of its devastation, particularly in September. And the same situation came as a surprise where health authorities also felt the shame that they haven’t responded as quickly as the situation warrants. They should have looked at Bacolod figures and realized raising the alert level at the start of the surge and not when the surge has slowly declined.

This tells us their definition of urgency in this struggle to survive the pandemic. Thus, if we depend on what our health authorities can do, we will just end up six feet below the ground.

The City Government should send a strong message to the IATF that their recent classification is already outdated and out of touch on what is happening on the ground.

They probably have awakened from a deep sleep after the devastation tried to slowly settle down.

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