Solon: DOH accountable for COVID-19 cases among health workers

A medical worker sprays disinfectant on a resident before taking an x-ray and an oropharyngeal swab during a mass testing for the COVID-19 coronavirus at a park in Quezon City, suburban Manila on April 15, 2020. (Photo by Ted ALJIBE / AFP)

MANILA, Philippines—House Assistant Minority Leader France Castro slammed the Department of Health for saying that Filipino medical frontliners may have contracted COVID-19 outside their places of work.

Castro, the ACT Teachers Representative, said that the lack of personal protective equipment for the health workers played a big factor in the high transmission among the frontliners.

As of Saturday, there have been 1,101 health workers who’ve been infected with the coronavirus, according to the health department.

“The DOH and the Duterte administration are saying that health workers acquired COVID from communities and not their places of work,” said Castro in a statement. “They only want to rid themselves of accountability for its lags, failures, and lapses in mass testing especially of health care workers and PPE procurement.”

“How can the DOH stick with this incredible PR tack when they have yet to finish contact tracing at that time? When it and the president [Rodrigo Duterte] himself reported that contact tracing is only batting an average of one contact per COVID-19 positive.”

In a virtual press briefing last Thursday, health undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said exposure to their own communities may have been the cause of infection for frontliners.

“Sa kalaunan naman nakikita natin na it’s not really PPEs eh (We can eventually see that it’s not really the PPEs). It’s something like when they go home and then they go back to work and then they get infections outside of their workplaces,” she said.

Castro added that the government should acknowledge its failures in providing enough protection to the health workers.

The World Health Organization expressed alarm over the high number of infected health workers in the Philippines wherein 15.8% have contracted the virus compared to the 2-3% average of other countries.

“Government has to make sure that we protect those who are in the frontlines of the battle against COVID-19 and should be accountable for its failures in making sure that our healthcare workers are protected,” said Castro.

“We cannot afford to lose more healthcare workers due to the government’s negligence and inaction to their basic demands for sufficient supply of protective equipment, mass testings to frontliners, suspected and probable cases of COVID-19, impose systematic contact tracings and massive hiring and regularization of healthcare workers.”