The World Health Organization supports the government's decision to shift to a looser quarantine status and to implement granular lockdowns in localities, with some recommendations to make the new policy efficient
"If we are now considering moving from a very stringent quarantine to a more relaxed quarantine with very granular lockdowns, which is something that the WHO advocates and supports, the critically important element is that those granular lockdowns, those actions need to be influenced by very accurate, very up-to-date data," WHO country representative Rabindra Abeyasinghe told CNN Philippines'Abeyasinghe noted that a timely and accurate data on the COVID-19 cases, their severity,...
"Because otherwise, we could end up in a situation that the granular lockdowns don’t give us the results that we need," he warned. The Philippine College of Physicians earlier raised concern on the alleged discrepancies in the Department of Health's data, particularly on available ICU beds in the country. The DOH said, however, that these things really happen when reporting COVID-19 cases in a national and local scale.Meanwhile, Abeyasinghe also recommended increasing the current average 70,000 COVID-19 tests per day.
"We acknowledge that the testing capacity has increased. We have now about 275 labs but if we look at the actual utilization of those labs, the assessment says we are not even using them at 50% ," he said. The Philippines logged a record-high tally of over 22,000 cases on Monday, the highest since the pandemic and the fourth consecutive day that the country breached the 20,000 mark in new infections.
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