The decision to impose a community quarantine in Metro Manila was a swift and decisive move to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) but it is important that the authorities gain public support for the measures they impose.
Fear, of course, is an effective motivator, but logic, common sense, transparency, and clear communication are just as important in gaining true community buy-in.
Working on the premise that we must know the extent of a problem before we can deal with it effectively, we surely need to be testing many more people. Health Secretary Francisco Duque III, for example, observes that with 11 dead out of 140 confirmed cases, the mortality rate here is a high 7.8 percent, well above the global estimate of 2 percent or 3 percent. He adds that the high mortality rate is a result of the limited number of tests that have been conducted. If more tests are conducted and more people are found to be positive, he said, the mortality rate, which is the number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases, would surely decline.
While the Department of Health has regularly reported on the number of deaths and confirmed cases, we do not know how many people have already been tested.
In contrast, South Korea learned a key lesson from the 2015 outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a more virulent coronavirus than COVID-19. At the time, a lack of tests prompted people sick with the disease to go from hospital to hospital to confirm if they had the bug. As a result, nearly half the people who got the disease were exposed at hospitals.
Are we doomed to follow the same path?
After the MERS outbreak, Korea enacted reforms that allowed the government to give near-instantaneous approval to testing systems in an emergency, the non-profit group ProPublica observes. Within weeks of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, four Korean companies had manufactured tests from a World Health Organization recipe, giving the government a system that could assess 10,000 people a day. Korea also set up drive-through test stations that minimized the exposure of health workers to the disease. As of March 14, South Korea had tested more than 248,000 people and identified 8,086 cases.
We applaud the test kit developed by the University of the Philippines and its approval by the Food and Drug Administration, but unless there is a plan to ramp up production of these kits in the tens of thousands, we would still be proceeding blind.
Singapore, meanwhile, demonstrated the importance of clear communication from the top.
After the government raised its outbreak alert in February one level below the maximum, Singaporeans emptied supermarket shelves. To quell the anxiety, Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong delivered an address to the nation in three of the city-state’s four official languages. “I want to speak to you directly, to explain where we are, and what may lie ahead,” he said. Supermarket lines soon eased.
In contrast, one top Philippine official showed callousness as Metro Manila began a month-long community quarantine. Asked what the government could do to ease the suffering of those affected by the new restrictions, this official quipped that “nobody died from hunger in a month” and suggested we must all make sacrifices. This is not the way to win community buy-in.
Finally, measures taken must have internal logic that the public can understand. We understand social distancing because we know how the virus is transmitted. We do not understand the reason to impose a curfew from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. as these hours have no relation whatsoever to the spread of the virus. If the objective of the curfew is to limit the gathering of large groups at night, that could have been more easily achieved by ordering bars and restaurants that stay open late to close early during the community quarantine period.
This isn't a time for local officials to flex their muscles; it is a time for them to do the jobs properly.