A frontliner in the fight against CoViD-19 here in Negros Oriental has made an emotional appeal to the local officials: Ensure that people stay in their homes.
Dr. Kenneth Coo, national chair of the Crisis Preparedness & Management Committee of the Philippine College of Physicians, met separately with the Dumaguete City Council on Wednesday and the Provincial Board on Thursday to personally ask them to enforce the quarantine and compel the people to stay home.
In his speech to the City Council, Dr. Coo broke down and cried when he said their only request was for the public to stay home since health workers would not be able to handle it if there were just too many persons under investigation (PUI).
“We ask our legislators to make the Stay Home [rule] implementable. That is our only request. Let them stay home, please. We cannot do that [contain the spread of the disease] kung daghang PUIs; wala gyud mi’y mahimo!,” Coo stressed, then broke down in tears.
A more composed Dr. Coo appeared before the Provincial Board on Thursday where he echoed the same appeal. Coo, medical director and head of operations of ONE Rescue EMS in Negros Oriental, and also medical director of Holy Child Hospital, recommended the conversion of gymnasiums as temporary makeshift hospitals to ensure that Patients under Monitoring for the CoViD-19 virus would be quarantined.
Dr. Coo said gymnasiums would be better than public school classrooms because of the need for social distancing. “If you have four PUMs in a classroom, you need a guard [in each classroom] to ensure that the patients will not get close to each other,” he said.
However in a gymnasium, one would only need one watcher to look out for several patients, he said.
The Negros Oriental Medical Society (NOMS) has also offered to train Barangay Health Workers on how to monitor PUMs. Once the patients exhibit more symptoms of CoViD-19, that would be the time they would be admitted in CoViD-designated hospitals, Coo said.
And if they do not exhibit symptoms after 14 days, they can be sent home.
Dr. Coo said the NOMS was also pushing for the designation of CoViD-19 hospitals in the Province, similar to what the Department of Health has done in Metro Manila to prevent in-hospital transmissions, and to unburden other hospitals that have to focus on other illnesses.
He said that once patients are exhibiting symptoms of CoViD-19, doctors should immediately assume they are dealing with a CoViD-19 case, while awaiting for swab test results.
The death of three patients in Dumaguete hospitals this week who exhibited CoViD-19 symptoms has also caused fear among health workers, he revealed. “One husband came to tell the head nurse that his wife is not reporting for work anymore because she is scared. Now that it has happened, there could be more who will follow,” Coo noted.
He also lamented that many doctors were not reporting for work, claiming they were out-of-town. “I wonder where ‘out of town’ is as you cannot go anywhere outside of Negros Oriental anymore,” admitting that it was confusing.
On Wednesday, Dr. Coo told the City Council to form police squads to enforce the quarantine, and compel the people to stay home because he noticed that many were not heeding the advice. “They play basketball. They go to church, and do other things,” Dr. Coo lamented.
He told the City Councilors that unless the people were confined in their homes, there would be more PUMs but that Dumaguete did not have enough facilities for the dreaded deluge of patients.
In his privilege speech Wednesday, Dumaguete Vice Mayor Alan Gel Cordova said treating all people in the City as PUMs, without exception, might help solve the problem of transmission and spread of the virus.
“There has to be a more strategic emphasis on stopping the transmission, that is, a lockdown in the smallest controllable unit,” Cordova said. “Two weeks is all we ask,” he said.
As of Wednesday, City Health Officer Dr. Sarah Talla said Dumaguete has recorded 394 PUMs.
Two patients, who were classified as PUIs, died Wednesday afternoon here in Dumaguete. The patients were both women, 40 and 59 years old. They died at the Negros Oriental Provincial Hospital while waiting for the results of their swab tests from the V. Sotto Memorial Medical Center in Cebu. On Thursday, their results came out: the 40-year-old tested negative. Dr. Liland Bustamante-Estacion, Integrated Provincial Health Office assistant chief, said the cause of death of the 40-year-old was severe acute respiratory infection (SARI).
The result for the 59-year-old is pending.
Last Tuesday, another PUI also died while waiting for her results of the swab test. She was a sister-in-law of PH39, the councilor from the municipality of Tayasan who was the first CoViD-19 fatality in Negros Oriental. Her swab results eventually showed that she tested positive of CoViD.
The woman’s husband, an older brother of PH39, is also in critical condition as a PUI in a local hospital. He is in his 70s. He tested negative of CoViD but needs a second confirmatory test, according to Dr. Estacion. (Irma Faith Pal)