​Delta watch 6 (A new experiment 2)

PHILIPPINES - In Brief 13 Sep 2021 by Romeo Bernardo

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After canceling at the last minute its decision to relax quarantine restrictions in Metro Manila last week, government announced over the weekend that it will proceed with the new system of granular lockdowns beginning September 16. The new system does away with the confusing alphabet soup of quarantine restrictions, leaving only the more stringent ECQ and the more relaxed GCQ. Controls will remain in place over high-risk areas with restrictions on closed space, crowded and close contact (3C) activities to continue based on a new system of alert levels, from the least restrictive “1” to the most restrictive “4.” In turn, the alert levels will depend on the specific areas’ attack rate[1]and healthcare utilization rate. The new system, which sounds just as complicated as the old one, can be expected to encounter implementation difficulties. Indeed, we understand that the reason for last week’s flipflop was the inability of national and local governments to agree on how to delineate areas that will be subjected to different alert levels. Too, the system is being put in place even as new cases are still increasing and ICU occupancy in hospitals is still at critical levels. Last we saw, all areas in the nation’s capital, except the city of Manila, were classified under Alert Level 4,[2] which bars all 3C activities.But most would agree that the country, with economic growth dragged lower and joblessness high, cannot continue under the current system and that a reformulation of government’s health strategy is needed to, basically, treat covid19 as an endemic disease. Metro Manila has been chosen to pilot the new strategy mainly because of its high vaccination coverage (60% f...