Contact tracing deteriorating – Magalong

MANILA, Philippines — The contact tracing system in the Philippines has declined in the past weeks, which contributed to the surge in COVID-19 cases in the country, according to contact tracing czar Benjamin Magalong.

Speaking at an online meeting of the House committee on health on Tuesday, Magalong said the national contact tracing efficiency ratio had decreased to 1:3.

“For the past four weeks, you can see that it really deteriorated. And look at the average—from 1:7, this is the national average—it went down to 1:3,” he said.

In Metro Manila, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said the patient to close contacts ratio was at 1:5 from Feb. 28 to March 14 then decreased to 1:3 from March 15 to 29.

The Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) has again called on all the local governments and the general public to use StaySafe.PH, the national government’s official contacting tracing application, for a “consistent and unified” digital contact tracing.

“Instead of using other apps, it is imperative for [local governments] to use the StaySafe app for a unified system that will allow seamless, fast, and efficient contact tracing efforts,” Bernardo Florece Jr., officer in charge of the DILG, said in a statement on Tuesday.

The DILG aims to reach at least 50 million users and connect all 1,634 city and municipal local governments across the country to make the contact tracing app effective.

Basically, the app will send a notification if you have been exposed to a person infected with the virus in the past days made through digital identifiers received by the phone via the Bluetooth’s 100-meter range.