Huge population among Philippine challenges in containing COVID-19

MANILA, Philippines — The high-density population of the country is one of the biggest challenges facing the government in its effort to contain the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, according to international author Tomas Pueyo.

“That is going to be the biggest challenge. You have millions of people working very close to each other. Many of them cannot just stay home because they are going to starve and how do you handle that situation?” Pueyo said when interviewed in the radio program of Presidential Communications Operations Office Secretary Martin Andanar at Radyo Pilipinas on Friday.

Pueyo, who introduced the Hammer and Dance strategy of controlling the spread of the virus, maintained that controlling the spread of COVID-19 is harder in highly populated countries like the Philippines.

He said the hammer concept aims to control the drastic spread of the infection by confinement or enhanced community quarantine in the Philippine context.

“The hammer is the very heavy set of measures to stop the economy so that the number of cases that are growing exponentially starts to slow down. Hopefully it goes completely down…reduces the deaths and, more importantly, gives the country time to figure out the second piece, which is the dance,” Pueyo pointed out.

“In the dance, we replace all these heavy measures—lockdowns and closure of schools and colleges and businesses—and replace them with a set of intelligent measures that can achieve the same goals. But without the same cost,” he added.

Pueyo underscored the need for the government to intensify testing, contact tracing and quarantine measures “if a city like Manila wants to stop the virus.”

The Spanish-French writer who went viral for his series of articles about the COVID-19 pandemic pointed out the importance of contact tracing in dealing with the virus.

“Meaning that you need to find everybody who has the virus, find all the contacts and isolate them either at home…or somewhere else,” he said, as he stressed that people who are infected “cannot stay home because if they stay home, they will infect the rest of the household and their neighbors.”

He also underscored the need for every country to focus on extensive data gathering to provide context and insight on how to control the disease.

“They do tell us what is happening at the high level. They never tell us the reality on the ground, but they give us a sense of where it’s going,” Pueyo explained.

Andanar said the country is already in the second phase (dance phase) of the implementation of the National Action Plan. He explained that this phase needs aggressive testing, contact tracing, and isolation and quarantine, while gradually reopening more economic activities.