Gov’t caught off guard by ‘worse’ COVID-19 surge: DILG

The Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) admitted on Monday that they were caught off guard by the new COVID-19 surge in March or a year after the first lockdown of the pandemic.

According to DILG Undersecretary Epimaco Densing, although the government is ready, it did not expect the severity of the COVID-19 surge, where more than 10,000 people test positive for the disease every day.

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“We never expected that the surge will be more than last year. We have to remember that the healthcare system was already that strong in January. The preparation of the healthcare system is because we expected holiday surge, even Traslacion, it didn’t happen. The system was strong until the first week of March but it went more than what was expected,” said Densing in an interview with ANC.

The official added that the public seems to have put aside the pandemic when the conversation about the vaccine started.

“There was really a complacency especially during the time we talked about vaccine. Everyone was so complacent that the spread came in even before we opened up the economy.”

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Gov’t caught off guard by ‘worse’ COVID-19 surge: DILG

Despite the increase in COVID-19 surge, Densing believes that the government is still responding well to the pandemic.

“I consider that we did better if we compare our response to other countries. The fact that the number went down after August, I think we were fairly successful. In January, infections in NCR [was] only at 314 until the second surge which made infections ten times more in early March.”

Today, facilities are overflowing with the number of patients with COVID-19.

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The OCTA Research group said Monday that the number of  in the Philippines could reach 1 million before the end of April.

According to the group’s monitoring report, while the transmission rate has slowed down in Metro Manila due to the implementation of enhanced community quarantine (ECQ), the number of cases still grew by 20% with 5,538 daily new cases over the past week.