DILG says more funds needed to hire contact tracers
MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Interior and Local Government on Tuesday urged the government to release more funds for the hiring of more contact tracers in response to the detection in the country of local cases of the highly infectious Delta variant of COVID-19.
The official in charge of overseeing contact tracing in the Philippines, Baguio City Mayor Benjamin Magalong, in May said that that it remains the “weakest link” in the government’s response against COVID-19.
"[Contact tracing] is one area of what we call surveillance capacity where the performance of our local government is not that good," Interior Undersecretary Epiamco Densing similarly told state-run media in an interview conducted in Filipino.
"So what we are doing is we are asking the Department of Budget and Management if we can be given funds from the 2021 budget to be allocated to additional contact tracers."
Densing also identified as crucial the passage of the Bayanihan 3 bill, a proposed P401-billion pandemic relief package meant to help sectors battered by renewed lockdowns, as it holds a big budget for the hiring of additional contact tracers nationwide.
The Bayanihan 3 bill cleared the House in June but has yet to be tackled by the Senate. Congress is currently on recess and will resume session on July 26.
Malacañang has repeatedly said that it does not view the passage of Bayanihan 3 as urgent.
It also confirmed on June 22 that more than P18 billion under the Bayanihan to Recover as One Act or Bayanihan 2 had yet to be used when the law expired on June 30. Despite this, President Rodrigo Duterte did not call for a special session of Congress to extend its validity.
A total of 35 Delta variant cases and three deaths have been detected by the Department of Health so far.
Health authorities earlier Tuesday said they reclassified as active seven local cases of the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant after retesting patients from Manila, Cagayan de Oro, and Misamis Oriental who were previously listed as recovered. They were among the first 11 local cases of the variant first seen in India reported by the DOH last week.
The Philippines has the second-worst coronavirus outbreak in Southeast Asia, trailing Indonesia with a total of 1.5 million cases and 26,786 deaths as of Monday.
— Bella Perez-Rubio with a report from The STAR
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