![[OPINION] A plea to the DOH for urgency and transparency](https://i.headtopics.com/images/2020/4/10/rapplerdotcom/opinion-a-plea-to-the-doh-for-urgency-and-transparency-1248556540702994433.webp)
'We need health officials who share our sense of urgency, who do not dismiss our concerns and answer complacently, providing very little information.' COVID19PH
I am not an epidemiologist by any stretch, though my degree was in a field of public health. But I study how agencies act and communicate during extreme events, like the one we are in now.
What it means is: increasing the numbers of people tested by having more inclusive criteria for testing, not limiting testing to just a few categories like the severely ill, and it means including those with mild symptoms. It means scaling up the tests done each day by a factor of 10 to a hundred. This is what all the other health agencies are doing. As late as March 20, Undersecretary Vergeire said we do not need mass testing.
Agencies, when they play safe, can become less transparent. But these are extraordinary times, and Filipinos demand to know everything that is going on. South Korea's foreign minister said,"The key to our success has been absolute transparency with the public.", the numbers appearing in the DOH's COVID Tracker were much different from what was being verbally reported . If you look at the website today, it only reports the bare minimum: total cases, recovered cases, mortalities.
Agencies need to claim victory. I have heard how the DOH is touting early success because infections in the Philippines seem to be only two in a million. But if the DOH is under-testing, can we really say anything? To exaggerate the point, if I test zero people, could I then say infection rates are zero in a million?
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