THE Senate is poised to convene as a Committee of the Whole to scrutinize the status of the nation’s health and input this assessment into the national Covid-19 response.
This, after senators unanimously adopted on Monday Resolution 483 sponsored by Sen. Richard Gordon seeking an inquiry into the current state of health of the nation focused on the “status, capability and plan to combat the Coronavirus disease 2019” or Covid-19 pandemic.
In filing the enabling resolution, Gordon noted that the country is still seeing an unabated increase in the number of Covid-19 cases, which reached a total of 112,593 (with 66,049 recoveries and 2,115 deaths)
as of August 5, 2020 despite the 45-day enhanced community quarantine that “cost the economy P1.1-trillion in losses, and 139 days of sporadic community quarantine.” The country also saw yet a new record of highest single-day infections logged, at 6,352.
Gordon rued that “the unabated increase in cases has severely challenged the country’s health care system that a number of hospitals were forced to suspend their admissions of Covid-19 patients because of full capacity or because of a bigger number of its hospital staff contracting Covid-19,” he added.
Moreover, the senator noted the pandemic “glaringly showed the country has insufficient number of doctors and healthcare workers” which, he noted, was even more highlighted after the Philippine College of Physicians pleaded for President Duterte to return Metro Manila to Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) for two weeks in August. They said they needed this fortnight as “timeout” for exhausted frontliners, and to recalibrate strategies against Covid-19 to fight back more effectively in what they saw as a “losing battle.”
According to Gordon, the Covid-19 pandemic “brought healthcare workers to exhaustion and infection, if not deaths.” He cited data that as of August 1, 2020, there were 5,008 health care workers who tested positive for Covid-19, of whom 38 died.
“Our doctors and other healthcare workers have become extremely burnt out, fearful, stressed out, and anxious and many of them stopped reporting for work,” said the senator, who works closely with them as chairman of the Philippine Red Cross.
At the same time, the Gordon Resolution asserted the need to reassess the health situation in the country and develop new strategies, a whole-of-society approach that would enable the government to inform and better equip citizens so they could fight Covid more effectively.
The Resolution added that “it behooves the Senate to listen to the plight of our doctors and other frontliners, and consequently to our suffering people, to find out what is wrong so we can alleviate their burden and provide the necessary impetus for all government agencies to work together to implement effective and science-based solutions and interventions and to finally start the rally against the fight with Covid-19.”