By Pearl Gumapos
Israeli health experts in the country to share COVID-19 response best practices said Friday (July 30) that their main recommendation to the Department of Health (DOH) is to continue vaccinating Filipinos.
“Our main recommendation for the Philippine’s Department of Health is to continue as they are doing at the moment in vaccinating more and more residents of the Philippines,” infectious diseases and COVID-19 specialist Dr. Guy Choshen said at a virtual presser of the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID).
“The more people will be vaccinated, you see less and less hospitalizations, and less and less severe critical cases. And this is what you’re looking for. This is your most important goal in order not to overwhelm the medical centers and medical institutes. So, continue with the vaccination campaign,” Choshen said.
He added that the question of using a third booster vaccine is irrelevant.
“As far as I understand, the goal is to get the first and second dose to as many people as possible, and not aiming for the third dose. This is not the main concern at the moment.”
“The main issue is vaccination. We can see that the Philippine government and the Department of Health is pushing up the campaign of vaccination and this is an opportunity for the citizens of the Philippines to cooperate with this campaign. This is the main way we can mitigate the pandemic,” Choshen added.
He said worldwide campaigns for vaccination must continue so that there will be fewer opportunities for the vaccine to mutate.
“The minute that happens, we’ll have less mutations, and maybe, eventually, we will have a dominant variant which will be worldwide, and we will live with it without the necessity to continue and vaccinate the population. This is the main goal of the planet: to vaccinate as many people as possible to lessen the opportunities for the virus to mutate,” he said.
On elections
Meanwhile, DOH Sec. Francisco Duque III said during the virtual presser that while the government cannot foresee what will happen in relation to the pandemic during election season next year, it will do its best to mitigate the impact of the pandemic.
“We will meet with the Comelec [Commission on Elections] en banc. This is the directive of the President during our meeting last Wednesday. We have to meet with them and help them come up with the health and safety protocols in the conduct of the campaign and the election proper itself,” Duque said.
The Israeli experts also offered their help, saying they have successfully held two elections during the past year and a half.
“We have plenty of experience both on setting the guidelines for political rallies and these kinds of activities. We had a whole system to allow the people to exercise their democratic right to vote and, at the same time, be able to maintain all the health restrictions,” Chaim Markos Rafalowski, disaster management coordinator at Israel’s Magen David Adom, said during the virtual presser.
“We, as a country, enabled all our citizens to participate in the democratic process. Israel, through the embassy of Manila, would be more than happy to share our experiences and the tools that we used,” he added.
According to a Philippine News Agency report, Choshen and Rafalowski, along with Shira Peleg, head nurse and nursing manager at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center’s Emergency Department, and Eyad Jeries, trauma coordinator at Galilee Medical Center, make up the second group of Israeli health experts to arrive in the country to share local clinical guidelines for COVID-19, infection control protocols, hospital management, and other practices.
The DOH said the Israeli team would visit hospitals and hold a dialogue with the country’s pandemic response cluster from July 27 to 31.
The first team of Israeli experts arrived last June to give advice on the vaccine rollout. # – jlo
