DOH sees need to put up lodgings for health workers

MANILA, Philippines — To help deal with the growing number of health-care workers infected with the new coronavirus, the Department of Health (DOH) on Tuesday said it was looking into providing them with accommodations to reduce their risk of contracting the virus in their communities.

According to Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire, the DOH is considering the health-care workers’ travel to and from work as a factor in the high number of infections among medical front-liners.

Vergeire cited the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM), which was forced to scale down operations last week after 45 of its employees tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus that causes the severe respiratory disease COVID-19.

Source of infection

“When they checked the procedures, everything was intact. The laboratory procedures and infection prevention and control [mechanisms] were OK. What they saw was that the source of the infection was an employee who has been going home and back [to the RITM], and had common activities with her coemployees,” Vergeire said.

“This is one of the factors that we are looking into now,” she added.

Vergeire noted that it was also one of the recommendations of the 12-member Chinese medical team that visited the country to assess the DOH’s response to the coronavirus pandemic that health-care workers be provided with accommodation “to prevent incidents like this.”

In a statement, the RITM said 38 of the 45 infected employees had fully recovered, while the rest were still on quarantine. A total of 1,280 RITM workers have been tested, of whom 1,000 have received their results.

Vergeire said the scaling down of operations at the RITM had affected the DOH daily testing output, but she expressed confidence that the agency could at least get close to its target daily testing capacity of 8,000 by Thursday.

As of Tuesday, there were 1,336 health-care workers in the country confirmed to be positive for the coronavirus. They now account for nearly 17 percent of the total 7,958 confirmed infections in the country.

More recoveries than deaths

Apart from the 181 new cases, the DOH also recorded 43 patients who have recovered from COVID-19, bringing the total number of survivors to 975. The death toll, however, rose to 530 as 19 more patients died.

Of the 1,336 infected health-care workers, 507 are nurses, 493 doctors, 74 nursing assistants, 47 medical technologists, 28 radiologic technologists, 11 respiratory therapists and 11 midwives. The remainder include dentists, barangay health workers, and administrative aides.

To date, 29 health workers had died, including 22 doctors.

Another factor in the high number of infections among health workers, Vergeire said, was that at the start of the coronavirus outbreak in the country, a lot of them were exposed to patients who provided incomplete information.

On top of that, she said, was the lack of personal protective equipment and some safety measures were inadequate.

In an earlier briefing, Vergeire said there were a total 1,069 doctors and 2,357 nurses who were either positive for the new coronavirus or under quarantine due to possible exposure. The figure represents around 2 percent of the total 70,000 registered doctors and 2.6 percent of the 90,308 registered nurses.

To ease the staffing shortage, the DOH launched an emergency hiring program, which to date had already deployed 310 health-care workers to the RITM, Philippine General Hospital, Lung Center of the Philippines, Jose N. Rodriguez Memorial Medical Center and East Avenue Medical Center.