‘We barely felt the effects of ECQ,’ emergency rooms still overwhelmed—PGH
Was shutting down the economy all for nothing?
Malacañang Palace didn’t want to call it ECQ when it announced the shutting down of commercial establishments from March 22 to April 4, Easter Sunday, calling it instead (still) GCQ but with further restriction of movement.
The acknowledgement—and ayuda to low-income families—that it was indeed ECQ (enhanced community quarantine) or the strictest of lockdowns came only a week later. Then they extended the ECQ to April 12, and finally to April 30 under MECQ (modified community quarantine).
All this, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque kept repeating at every last-minute extension of the lockdown, was to help relieve the overwhelmed hospitals of COVID patients and to keep new infections down. Since the beginning of March, COVID cases have climbed at an alarming rate and hit a record-high of 15,310 in one day on April 2, Good Friday.
After a month, has the ECQ/MECQ in NCR Plus (Metro Manila, Bulacan, Rizal, Cavite, Laguna) actually worked?
Not really, according to the Private Hospitals Association of the Philippines (PHAPI) on CNN Philippines’ New Day.
PHAPI president Dr. Jose Rene de Grano said, “Wala talaga halos naging improvement. We were expecting after ECQ talagang luluwag, so we’re waiting for at least or two weeks, pero ngayon naka one week na parang nag plateau pa rin yung number of cases. Halos tuloy-tuloy pa rin. Nung mag MECQ parang na negate yung positive effects ng ECQ. Ganun pa rin ang results. Other hospitals have reported bumalik pa rin sa dati, na talagang na-overwhelm ulit. Napupuno na rin ang mga emergency rooms.”
New Day continued that according to the Department of Health, “the effects of the ECQ are not yet fully felt but they are now seeing a decongestion in ICU bed use.”
PGH (Philippine General Hospital) Spokesperson Dr. Jonas del Rosario said, “The highest number that we reached was 249 confirmed patients admitted to PGH out of our 255 beds. That was about one week ago. Then it went down a little bit, now we’re averaging about 225 to 230 patients. Slight decrease in the numbers but still steady.
“Our ICUs are always full. The moment someone vacates the ICU, there’s one waiting in the wings. The emergency rooms, I was told, has about 25 beds for COVID, sometimes 30 patients are there. There are a lot of patients waiting to be transferred to PGH but we couldn’t admit them because a lot of them are also severe to critical. We now have only a few available beds for the moderate cases now.
“In general I would say we barely felt the effects of the ECQ. The only positive thing about it was it did not get higher than 249. It went down a little bit but it’s steady now from 225 to 230.”
Dr. del Rosario added, “We have enough healthcare workers but we closed some of our non COVID operations to be able to pull out some of our nurses and doctors to man our COVID operations. And we are hiring doctors, nurses and med techs.”
Yesterday, April 19, the DOH logged 9,628 new COVID cases, bringing the total infections to 945,745.