Guinea pig for the tourism industry
When Secretary Carlito Galvez visited Bohol last week, we welcomed him and his team from the IATF with gratitude for extending a big help to the province by providing a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machine and some personal protective equipment. Indeed, Bohol desperately needs COVID-19 testing laboratories in place since test results of specimens sent to the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center in Cebu City take more than a week now before they are released.
When Galvez initially broke the news of making Bohol as a model for the new normal in the tourism industry, Boholanos had mixed reactions to the plan. Some dismissed the idea as purely part of the pleasantries when government officials meet. But when the plan to make Bohol and Baguio as tourism models amid the COVID-19 crisis was announced by IATF on national television, it becomes clear that Bohol will soon become a guinea pig for the tourism industry.
Is Bohol ready for the great experiment? If we count our record as COVID-free as our credential, that has long been shattered when a Chinese tourist was found positive of the virus. We were lucky to have no local transmission yet. The absence of a local transmission cannot be attributed to our excellent capability to test, isolate, and treat as what the World Health Organization (WHO) considers as the best strategy to contain the virus. Bohol was able to contain the spread of the virus, not because of following the WHO’s recommendation but because we closed our borders early enough. The best strategy that we have done is to isolate the province from the rest of world. We really did not learn how to live with the virus, we simply avoided it. And this strategy is starting to become irrelevant as we opened our doors to the OFWs and locally stranded individuals. By June or July, according to the IATF’s plan, tourists will be coming in and, God forbids, the virus as well.
Although the province will soon be capable for testing, there is no real test yet of how efficient and effective our capability for contact tracing is when local transmission is within our midst. As admitted by the DOH, the Philippines needs some 95,000 more contact tracers to boost its response to the coronavirus pandemic. At present, the country only has 38,000 contact tracers, far from the 126,000 benchmark to meet WHO’s standard. Using the WHO’s standard of 1 contact tracer for every 800 people, Bohol needs close to 2,000 contact tracers. The budget for this number of contact tracers is quite daunting and like the scenario in our healthcare system before the pandemic, we must make do of what we have. How many contact tracers does the province have? There is no clear figure yet. As for the isolation facilities here, it appears that even accommodating the repatriated OFWs and the locally stranded individuals already poses a big challenge to the capacity of our local government units. Managing the exodus has already pushed some LGU’s to the limits. For the capacity of our treatment facilities, even the long list of machines and equipment prepared by a local pulmonologist already shows that our treatment facilities may not be able to effectively manage COVID-19 patients according to world standards. This was admitted by Governor Arthur Yap and was cited as one of the reasons for his aggressive protection strategy.
While we are not opposed to the plan to make Bohol a model for the tourism industry under the new normal, it is how the IATF implements its plans that we are very much apprehensive of. In the case of the OFWs, while the province has done its best to establish and follow its own protocols for receiving OFWs, we were caught flat-footed when the OWWA sent them home with a very short notice and without proper coordination. Some of them as in the case of returning OFWs in Bohol, Cebu, Iloilo, and other provinces, even tested positive upon arrival in their respective provinces. With Bohol as a model for the new normal, we will soon be seeing local and foreign tourists again, and most probably, some of them may be silent carriers of the virus.
Do we have reasons to be afraid of this experiment? Based on Bohol’s existing capacity for testing, isolation, and treatment, the fear is well-grounded. Certainly, Boholanos do not want to become victims of the national government’s execute-and-plan-later approach.