[OPINION] How UP’s best minds are helping fight COVID-19

This column is in praise of the University of the Philippines, and what it has contributed in the fight against COVID-19—justifying once again its role as the country’s national university and the money the Filipino people have spent on it. And this does not include the role of its alumni.

The list is not exhaustive, and not given in any order of importance. But first, the general characteristics of these contributions: They are fact-based, evidence-based, science-based, done with transparency. Why? As one of the UP reports states: “COVID-19 is not an invisible enemy. It leaves behind traces of itself, which we can use to get ahead of the curve and stop it in its tracks. But to get there, we have to gather—and share—as much data as possible, apply the best science available, and ultimately listen to what the numbers could tell us.”

That, essentially, is what the UP COVID-19 Pandemic Response Team has done since it was organized on March 19. Led by UP executive vice president Dr. Teodoro Herbosa and UP Resilience Institute executive director

Dr. Alfredo Lagmay, its other 10 members come from all over the university.

Reader, I invite you to go to its https://endcov.ph/ website which it created within two weeks of its existence. The site contains all—and I mean ALL—the vital information needed to fight COVID-19: the usual dashboard containing up-to-the-minute data on confirmed, recovered, and deceased cases; PUIs and PUMs; number of persons tested; cases by sex, by age, by city (in the NCR).

The website also provides a map view of the Philippines plus the country in the international scene, plus a complete list (with contact numbers and locations) of Philippine COVID-19 hospitals, plus all the COVID-19 policies issued by the government—general, health, economic, education, mobility.

And it has created a platform for LGUs to report COVID-19-related data per barangay. Data collected, it avers, can help LGUs, down to the barangay level, monitor and gain insights on the spread of COVID-19.

All of the above has to do with the facts, the evidence. We know that UP (the Philippine Genome Center, the National Institutes of Health) has come up with a low-cost COVID-19 detection kit (GenAmplify) that has been approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration. That’s the science.

Further, its latest report (April 13, 2020) answers the question on how effective the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) has been to contain the spread of COVID-19. And the answer is a definite yes, based on two metrics: one is the doubling growth rate of cases, and the other is the case fatality rate (and reproductive number). The doubling growth rate of cases has slowed down from three days to six days, and so has the case fatality rate. In addition, the reproductive number has gone down to less than 1, which apparently is where it should be.

The other question that the April 13 report answers is: Since the ECQ has proven effective, how should it be implemented after April 30 without unnecessarily paralyzing local economies over a long period of time? Here, the team comes up with a proposal that involves getting the ratio of confirmed cases to the estimated outbreak threshold in the LGU. A ratio of less than 75 percent requires no community quarantine, all the way up to a ratio of greater than 2, which requires extreme enhanced community quarantine for the LGU.

Transparent, evidence-based, science-based, and data-based. Of course, the quality of the data should be improved.

Take all this, and combine it with the at least equally rigorous UPSE faculty paper “Surviving the Lockdown and Beyond” (disclosure: Its lead author is my daughter, Toby C. Monsod), which details what should be done to recover from the pandemic’s social and economic consequences, including how funds can be raised for the purpose.

And what do you get, Reader? You get the best minds of the country, all in the University of the Philippines, putting together the programs that will give the best possible results for the Filipino people.

Push on, UP.

(A top-of-the-head reaction to the resignation of Ernie Pernia as socioeconomic planning secretary, and his replacement by Karl Chua, undersecretary of the Department of Finance: Karl is an economist, but he is first of all Sonny Dominguez’s man. This may not augur well for economic decision-making. I hope I am wrong.)