The Palace gave a high rating to the government's response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, and said that the Philippines is the best in the whole continent of Asia, or perhaps the whole world, when it comes to pathogen testing. "All in all, I think we deserve a very good grade, I would give it a grade of 85%," presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said in a virtual briefing, Tuesday. That is even the largest single-day deaths of COVID-19 recorded in Philippine history yesterday, according to the Department of Health (DOH).
Roque is proud that the Philippines has exceeded the expectations of experts and mathematicians, who first estimated that there will be 3 million COVID-19 cases in the Philippines in June.
According to the DOH's latest estimate, 265,888 people have been killed by the deadly disease in the country, although 259 were reported dead on Monday by the dreaded virus. He said the Philippine case mortality rate is very low, at only 1.7%. It refers to the percentage of deaths in a disease compared to all infected in one area. Apart from that, the capacity of intensive care unit (ICU) beds is still 50% while the available ventilators are still 74% so far, which is why he said that the country's health system is "not overwhelmed". The Philippines has been portrayed several times as having the largest "active cases" of COVID-19 in the entire Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), or those still ongoing cases that have not yet recovered or are dying. The person who was given the "failed" rating of Citizens Urgent Response To end Covid first said the government's COVID-19 response, especially since it is still sloppy in meeting the needs of the people such as daily target testing. "In terms of effectiveness, we really failed a bit. We still need improvement. We need to see its effectiveness. Back to Square One happened," said Dr. Joshua San Pedro, co-founder of the Coalition for People's Right to Health (CPRH) in July.