Health Secretary Ted Herbosa mentioned Monday that he would advocate lifting the nation’s COVID-19 state of public well being emergency.
In an ambush interview, Herbosa careworn that COVID-19 now not posed an emergency and might be handled as every other illness that the Department of Health (DOH) screens, like influenza, cough, and chilly.
“Actually, wala nang emergency eh, ‘di ba? (there is no longer an emergency). I think I would actually ask the lifting of the public health emergency in the country,” he mentioned.
Then-President Rodrigo Duterte declared a state of public well being emergency in the course of the onset of the pandemic in March 2020.
Under Proclamation 922, the state of public well being emergency would stay in drive and impact till lifted or withdrawn by the President.
In May, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that COVID-19 now not represented a world well being emergency.
Herbosa, nonetheless, mentioned that the alert degree system would stay.
“The alert level system will stay because that’s a system like the typhoon signal that stays. But actually hindi na siya (that’s no longer a) public health emergency. Wala nang (there’s no) public health emergency,” he added.
In April, former DOH officer-in-charge Maria Rosario Vergeire mentioned that the Philippines might solely declare an finish to its COVID-19 public well being emergency if infections and hospital utilization remained manageable.
Vergeire had additionally mentioned that the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) was pushing for the alert degree system for use as a threat communication software and now not an identifier of what restrictions must be imposed in a specific space amid the COVID-19 pandemic. — DVM, GMA Integrated News
Source: www.gmanetwork.com
