THE government on Tuesday reported the arrival of an additional 250,000 personal protective equipment (PPE) now ready for distribution to frontliners in the campaign against the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19).
In a videorecorded news briefing, chief implementer of the government’s national policy on Covid-19 Carlito Galvez said the additional PPEs recently arrived at a local port, bringing their reserve supply of PPEs to over 600,000.
Of the said PPE sets, 230,000 are in the General Headquarters Warehouse in Camp Aguinaldo, while the remaining 20,000 are in a warehouse in Davao.
Galvez said once their expected additional PPE shipments arrive this month, they will be able to “stabilize” their PPE supplies.
Currently, the government is waiting for the arrival of 3 million PPE sets it procured for the months of June up to August.
He said the sufficient supply of PPEs will help minimize the exposure of government frontliners to Covid-19 infection, amid criticism that failure to protect them had left the country with a high ratio of infected health workers versus the total number of Covid-19 patients.
“Since we started distributing PPEs, no doctor was reported to have died (from Covid-19) since May. I would like to report we were able to preserve our frontliners [as part of our compliance] with your guidance to us to preserve [the lives] of our doctors and our medical personnel,” said Galvez, when he reported to President Duterte on Tuesday.
Currently, the government has already distributed 1,033,000 PPEs to 699 hospitals nationwide. Of the beneficiary hospitals, most, or 389, are in Luzon. The remaining PPEs were distributed in hospitals in Mindanao (225) and Visayas (85).
Galvez earlier reported they are now in the process of acquiring 11 million medical-grade PPE sets by 2021 to ensure a stockpile of the items, which have become valuable worldwide due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
He said the government has allocated P20 billion for the initiative.
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