MANILA - The Philippine government has been unable to keep a lid on the COVID-19 pandemic, a former health secretary said on Friday, warning that the country faces an uphill battle.
"You know we have not controlled it... What I'm saying is we're trying to control it but we are not able to control it and that's why it's an upward curve," Dr. Manuel Dayrit told an online forum organized by the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines .
DOH reports 4,040 cases today, the highest since August 30. This brings the total to 252,964 cases of which 62,250 are active.- 4,108 total"It could be far worse, but certainly, if your benchmarks are countries like Thailand or Vietnam, we are not doing as well as them," added Dayrit, who headed the health department during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS outbreak in 2003.
To win the battle against the virus, the government should be "one step ahead," like what the health department did then during the 2003 outbreak, bringing SARS under control with only a dozen cases and 2 fatalities recorded, Dayrit said. "It's too late to stop the community transmission. It has spread. What we can only do now is keep working on mitigation," he added.
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