WHO Representative to the Philippines Dr. Rabindra Abeyasinghe reiterates that the COVID-19 vaccine rollout has resulted to the public’s relaxed compliance to health protocols—an observation made globally.
“With the arrival of vaccines people start relaxing their protocol compliance. There was a tendency not largely but in small measure, to go out more frequently to meet more frequently with other people,” Dr. Abeyasinghe said at the Laging Handa Public Briefing.
The WHO representative also noted COVID-19 cases in January and February seemed to have “stabilized” but cases increased in March amid the vaccine rollout.
“There was an optimism that people can go back to their life before the pandemic, this little change in compliance is believed to have caused opportunity for the virus to transmit more freely and that could have been the cause why we are seeing increase in transmission in the Philippines.”
This is not limited to the Philippines alone, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom says last week was the fourth consecutive week-on-week increase on the number of COVID-19 cases reported globally.
But the WHO’s position was not free from criticism. Contrary to the statement of other spectators, the increase in cases was not primarily due to the government’s “slow response” as the vaccine optimism and relaxed public compliance was seen globally.
“It’s something larger than the slow response,” says Dr. Abeyasinghe, “the slow response could be attributed to increase in cases continuing but the fundamental reason that actually contributed to the increase in cases is rather more likely to be linked (to vaccine optimism).”
The WHO is also working closely with the Department of Health and the Philippine Genome Center to prove the correlation of the P3 COVID-19 variant with the increased virus transmissibility and the severity of the disease.
“This process takes a long time the P3 variant was confirmed only in early March, late February this is going to take a few more weeks or months to understand the epidemiological significance of the P3 variant whether it is linked to increased transmissibility and severity of disease.”
In the meantime, the WHO representative says public health compliance needs to be reinforced while the local government units play a significant role in expediting case detection, testing, tracing, quarantine and isolation of infected and exposed individuals. – Naomi Tiburcio
