Metro patients swamp hospitals outside capital. Inquirer Newsletter. April 1, 2021.

No images? Click here   NO BEDS   Patients gather outside the emergency room of Andres Bonifacio Memorial Medical Center in Manila on Wednesday waiting to be admitted. The hospital has announced that its beds allotted for COVID-19 patients are full. Its COVID-19 ward and isolation rooms have topped capacity. It’s no better at other hospitals in Metro Manila, forcing patients to cross the borders to seek admission in public and private hospitals in Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal and Quezon. —RICHARD A. REYES     News PH, China sea row play out on radio A Philippine military plane flying over the West Philippine Sea on Tuesday received messages from a Chinese radio operator telling the pilot to leave the area. The Filipino crew radioed back to say that they were conducting routine maritime patrol over the country’s exclusive economic zone. The military is checking whether the Chinese vessels that swarmed the Julian Felipe Reef had dispersed to other reefs. —STORY BY DEXTER CABALZA Read more: newsinfo.inquirer.net   World WHO probers denied access to virus data GENEVA/ZURICH—Data was withheld from World Health Organization (WHO) investigators who traveled to China to research the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, the WHO said on Tuesday. The United States, the European Union and other Western countries immediately called for China to give “full access” to independent experts to all data about the original outbreak in late 2019. —STORY BY REUTERS AND AFP Read more: newsinfo.inquirer.net/World   Newsletter / Join us Has this been forwarded by a friend? Subscribe now to the Philippine Daily Inquirer Newsletter and get your latest news and important updates on COVID-19. Subscribe     Sign up   Banner Story Metro patients swamp hospitals outside capital By Maricar Cinco Public and private hospitals in Calabarzon (Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal and Quezon) are running at critical or near capacity, as the region takes on spillover COVID-19 cases from Metro Manila while tackling a surge of its own. At Batangas Medical Center, a tertiary Department of Health (DOH) hospital, recently admitted were “5-6” COVID patients, from Metro Manila over a hundred kilometers away from Batangas City, Dr. Eduardo Janairo, the DOH regional chief, said on Wednesday. Overrun hospitals in Metro Manila are crying for reinforcements, with Dr. Jaime Almora, president of Philippine Hospital Association, saying in a television interview on Wednesday that the fight against COVID-19 had been lost. “It’s full everywhere. At night, at dawn, we couldn’t find a hospital to refer  [patients],” said Janairo, who added that Calabarzon had just lost another patient. The DOH would soon put up tents outside the hospitals for patients waiting for admission into the emergency rooms or intensive care units, and convert the Southern Tagalog Regional Hospital in Bacoor City, Cavite, to exclusively handle COVID-19 cases. “These are proposals [to open tents] but where do we get the staff to man [these] expansions,” said Dr. Jose de Grano, president of the Private Hospitals Association of the Philippines Inc. who lives in Lipa City, Batangas. In a separate interview, De Grano said most private hospitals in Calabarzon and Central Luzon  were operating at critical (more than 85 percent occupied) or high-risk (more than 70 percent occupied) level. “In Lipa, five big hospitals are full already,” he said. In its March 29 report, the regional DOH office in Calabarzon said COVID-19 bed use was 61.4 percent, while medical ventilators use was 37.7 percent. Rizal province alone had hit 73.8 percent bed use. Of the 306 temporary treatment and monitoring centers, 22 percent were fully occupied with mild cases, many of these in Laguna. Supplies running low Robert Mendoza of the Alliance of Health Workers said hospital employees were “mentally and physically exhausted and demoralized.” Supplies of protective suits and medicines have started to run low, he said. In an online forum by the Solidarity of Health Advocates and Personnel for a Unified Plan to Defeat COVID-19, Mendoza described how hospital directors nearly cried at a Congress hearing saying they could no longer take in anymore patients unless “another patient gets discharged.” Mendoza said 10-50 patients were on the waitlist at emergency rooms in several big hospitals in Metro Manila. At East Avenue Medical Center, 527 health workers have contracted the virus, “five of them [have] already died,” he said. To ease the congestion, the DOH has reopened two isolation centers that it closed when cases went down last year. At an online news briefing, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said the field hospital in  Quezon Institute, with 112 beds, would be reopened by Monday to handle recovering patients to decongest hospitals. Earlier this month, Rizal Memorial Coliseum, with 27 beds, and Ninoy Aquino Stadium, with 127 beds, were reopened to handle recovering patients. Vergeire told the public to expect rises in new COVID-19 cases, as the government would soon start using rapid antigen testing kits for confirmatory tests. Antigen tests detect the presence of a specific viral antigen, which implies infection, and are generally quicker than the reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test, which the DOH still considers the gold standard in coronavirus testing. Vergeire said the antigen test kits would be used during contact tracing. More infections On Wednesday, the DOH recorded 6,128 new coronavirus infections, pushing the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country to 747,288 overall. It said 106 more patients had died, bringing the death toll to 13,297. But 491 other patients had recovered, it said, raising the total number of COVID-19 survivors to 603,746. The DOH said the country had 130,245 active cases, of which 95.8 percent were mild, 2.6 percent asymptomatic, 0.38 percent moderate, 0.6 percent severe and 0.6 percent critical. Elsewhere in Luzon, hospitals were surviving on donations from private citizens, business companies and nongovernmental organizations while waiting for supplies from the DOH. In Pangasinan, Region 1 Medical Center in Dagupan City has received personal protective equipment and other supplies from the Integrated Bar of the Philippines, SM, Society of Medical Specialists in Government Service and Immaculate Conception of Greenhills. In Benguet province, health workers at Cordillera Hospital of the Divine Grace are making their face shields with recycled acetate sheets and protective personal equipment with used hospital sheets. —WITH REPORTS FROM PATRICIA DENISE M. CHIU, YOLANDA SOTELO, KARLSTON LAPNITEN, VALERIE DAMIAN AND TONETTE OREJAS Read more: newsinfo.inquirer.net   Editorial Contact tracing fail Despite the blizzard of contact tracing forms or QR codes now required everywhere, the government itself appears clueless on how to handle the collected information. Take it from presidential spokesperson Harry Roque: Contact tracing remains the 'weakest link' in the government’s pandemic response—which is putting it mildly. On Monday, March 29, the Department of the Interior and Local Government announced that the integration between the StaySafe.ph app and the LGUs’ respective contact-tracing apps will finally begin. The contact tracing apps of other LGUs can now be interoperable with the StaySafe.PH app, which will be used as the primary contact tracing system in the country. Over a year into the pandemic, with deadly new variants complicating the picture and the health care system once again at breaking point, will the administration finally get contact tracing right?   Read full story: opinion.inquirer.net Learn more   Copyright © 2020 PHILIPPINE DAILY INQUIRER, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: P.O. Box 2353, Makati Central Post Office, 1263 Makati City, Philippines.   Share    Tweet    Share    Forward  Preferences  |  Unsubscribe