MANILA, Philippines — A research group has stressed that health workers, especially those working at facilities inside the National Capital Region (NCR) and nearby provinces, should be prioritized in the on-going COVID-19 vaccinations to avoid problems brought by the latest surge.
In its report on Monday, OCTA Research said that the surge it monitored within NCR — if not addressed — can eventually overwhelm hospitals and, therefore, impact health workers and frontliners.
“[…] Given that a surge of new cases in the NCR is anticipated in the next few weeks and could possibly overwhelm its health care system and its workers, we encourage our health workers in the NCR and in the adjacent provinces, together with the other front liners identified as a priority by the national vaccination program, to get themselves vaccinated,” OCTA Research explained.
In the same report, the group highlighted observations that NCR is already experiencing a new but quicker surge in COVID-19 cases with higher infection rates and new cases than previous weeks.
According to OCTA Research, the COVID-19 reproduction number in NCR has increased to 1.5 compared to the country’s reproduction rate of 1.2. If the trend continues, NCR may have 2,200 new daily cases by the end of March.
OCTA Research also hypothesized that a new and more infectious COVID-19 variant might already be spreading as NCR exhibited similar trends to that of Mountain Province and Cebu City — areas that registered the B.1.1.7 variant cases, believed to have originated from the United Kingdom (UK).
READ: OCTA Research warns: Quicker COVID-19 surge already started in NCR
Aside from NCR, the group, composed of the country’s top academicians, also mentioned Cebu City and Lapu-Lapu City as areas of concern, even though the upward trends have slowed down already.
OCTA Research added that these developments only underscore the importance of the government’s urgent but efficient rollout of vaccines, and at the same time, the assurance that health workers would be vaccinated first.
“Given that a surge in the NCR is now not a question of if but of how much, we exhort the government to ensure the urgent but efficient deployment of vaccines in the next two weeks,” OCTA Research said.
“We hope the national government, in coordination with the LGUs, will ensure that our health workers in the NCR and nearby provinces would be vaccinated together with the other front liners identified as a priority by the national vaccination program,” it noted.
The Philippines started vaccinating government health workers and frontliners on Monday after the Chinese government-donated COVID-19 vaccines from Sinovac Biotech arrived on Sunday.
Among the first to legally receive vaccines are Philippine General Hospital Director Dr. Gerardo Legazpi and other health staffers, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) chief Eric Domingo, and other officials like MMDA chairperson Benhur Abalos.
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