The Department of Health (DOH) in Region 7 on Wednesday sent 54 medical workers to the National Capital Region (NCR) Plus area to augment healthcare capacity amid the surge of COVID-19 cases there.
The team includes 35 nurses, 11 doctors, and eight medical technologists from various hospitals in Cebu.
DOH-Region 7 Spokesperson Dr. Mary Jean Loreche said more than 100 healthcare workers are to be deployed from Region 7 to the Greater Manila Area in the coming days. Medical frontliners from Bohol, Siquijor, and Negros Oriental are also offering their services.
“With what we are doing right now, I am very confident that we will not be needing so much healthcare workers and not needing more beds than what we have, because our critical care utilization is very, very low at 31 percent. So we really are in the safe zone for our bed allocation and for our manpower,” Loreche stated.
The latest DOH data show that the utilization of intensive care unit (ICU) beds in NCR is at 79% or critical level.
Meanwhile, data show that the majority of COVID-19 cases are from the 20 to 49 years-old age range. DOH Spokesperson Dr. Maria Rosario Vergeire explained that this is “because it is the productive age group” composed mostly of workers “that go out every day [and] go home to their loved ones after.”
The DOH is also recommending to the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF-EID) the extension of the work-from-home arrangement to reduce the mobility of workers in NCR. It is also pushing for the vaccination of individuals on the A4 Priority list that covers essential workers.
The vaccination of priority list individuals who have recovered from COVID-19 is also being studied.
“Because of the high community transmission here in Metro Manila, we would like to protect immediately these people who were initially vaccinated already and had the disease,” Vergeire said. – Report from Mark Fetalco/AG-jlo
