"Contact tracing is the key to effective containment of contagion."
"Contact tracing is the key to effective containment of contagion."
Many are praising the governments of Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea for the way they handled the COVID-19 epidemic. And indeed they deserve to be emulated.
They acted fast. Their health officials knew what they were doing because they learned their lessons from previous epidemics—SARS and MERS. And through the years following these epidemics, they had enough foresight to build their defenses against such viral contagion, not taking any chances should an outbreak occur.
Even highly developed countries such as New Zealand and Israel are publicly declaring that they are looking at Taiwan as a model, a template, in their own fight to contain the disease, and Israel added, also to fight terrorism.
Two weeks ago, the Taiwan government, through its Minister of Health, Chen Shih-chung announced that a Taiwanese national had traveled to the Philippines and upon his return, complained of symptoms akin to the dreaded coronavirus. He was immediately confined.
But beyond confinement and treatment, the Ministry interviewed him about his activities in the Philippines, and provided our own government the information that could help us trace the contacts he may have unwittingly infected. Luckily, he was only in Metro Manila, but for a ferry ride to Corregidor. The malls he went to, the places he visited were identified.
Contact tracing is the key to effective containment of contagion.
For the longest time, more than a month if memory serves me right, our health department reported only three persons afflicted with the new strain of virus. Now there is an explosion of contagion numbers, the latest, as I write Tuesday morning, 142.
To be fair, hindi tayo nag-iisa. Italy, Iran, all of Europe in fact have become the new epicenter of the disease after China’s contagion rate seems to have abated.
The failure to do proper and efficient contact tracing, followed by isolation and treatment, is being blamed for the widespread contagion. Not so in Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea.
And the tool that helped these governments maintain effective contact tracing is the national I.D. Every citizen has a reference number registered in government computer systems. Every alien resident has an alien registration card or AC.
The Taiwan national ID is very basic, a piece of paper as large as a calling card, which contains name, picture, date and place of birth, spouse’s name if any, parent’s names, date of issuance, present address (which you must report if you transfer), military status if any, and a unique alpha-numeric code, plus hologram and barcode. Note: paper, not plastic which will cost more. Laminate it at your expense. Nothing fancy nor expensive. But it works.
Every citizen and documented alien, such as the almost 600 million contract workers in Taiwan, are covered by their National Health Insurance system, which provides almost free health care. This is the reason why Taiwanese nationals and residents go to clinics and hospitals and consult medical professionals for even the slightest symptom of physical disorder. They pay so little for consultation, with free basic laboratory and X-ray tests, and free medicines.
It is considered one of the best, if not the best, public healthcare system in the world. And the manner by which they are fighting the spread of the virus is testament to that efficiency.
Yesterday, Minister Chen reported that Taiwan has five cases from Turkey while their government has reported only five cases thus far. This indicates that there are more than the Turkish government is able to acknowledge. He warned would-be travelers that there are many other countries in the world where the actual numbers may be far higher than the official figures.
Flashback: As early as when he became a senator in 2001, Ping Lacson filed a bill that would require a national reference card system, better called a national I.D. It was only in the previous Congress that his continuously re-filed bill (SB No. 1738) was passed into law in 2018 after seventeen years of enduring unfounded fears from the vociferous Left who use the right to privacy as masquerade for the hide-and-seek status of their cadres and sympathizers.
Yet up to the present, even as a watered-down Philippine Identification System Act (R.A. 11055) was signed into law by President Duterte as far back as Aug. 6, 2018, it has not been implemented.
That national I.D. is still in the realm of dreams. As far as I am told, they are still quibbling about the security features in crafting the terms of reference for bidding out the millions of cards.
We have also passed, principally authored by former Senator JV Ejercito, a Universal Health Care Law. Yet the Philippine Health Insurance System is still mired in so many internal financial problems that its newly appointed administrator is still trying to untangle.
Now the President is tasking the barangay officials, and rightly so, drawing from his long experience as a city mayor, to be vanguards in the contact tracing and self-isolation effort so essential to the war against the viral contagion.
That is not an easy task. There are barangays with tens of thousands of residents in the National Capital Region, and with no single I.D. system, the barangay chieftains have a daunting responsibility ahead of them. And time is not an ally in this fight.
Every single day, now that the contagion has been long under-reported and exploding so quickly, is a battle in this war.
In the remote areas of Luzon, some barangays are so inaccessible, and many residents may not even have birth certificates captured by our census system. The consolation is that these are also unlikely to have been reached by the contagion.
Extreme measures have had to be undertaken by the national government in order to contain the affliction that has bedeviled the entire world save Antarctica.
Media, our legislators, and the public will surely seek answers in the near future, when the crisis has abated, from our responsible agencies as to why we were unable to respond in better and quicker fashion. But this is not the time.
For now, it must be all hands on deck. It is time for solidarity, for discipline, for following orders and guidelines from lawful authority. Time to be a nation in the true sense of the word.
And for our President, for him to contemplate in the midst of a crisis not of his doing in the remotest way, let me quote from J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic:
Frodo: “I wish it need not have happened in my time.”
Gandalf: “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them (or us) to decide. All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given us.”
