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MANILA, Philippines – The government has directed all health facilities to get the consent of coronavirus patients to disclose their identities to the public, to help authorities seek out their contacts who may have also contracted the virus.
In a televised briefing late Friday night, March 27, Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles read out the latest resolution from the Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID).
“To encourage the voluntary coordination with epidemiology and surveillance units (ESU) of close contacts of patients who tested positive for COVID-19, and subject to the right of patients to withhold consent, all health facilities, whether public or private, are hereby directed to request for the consent of said patients for the public disclosure of their identity,” the resolution states.
Although patients may still refuse to have their identities publicized, health workers are now mandated to ask them.
Philippine law allows for data privacy, and so far the government has not disclosed the identities of coronavirus patients, identifying them publicly only by their number in the sequence of confirmed cases.
“So pakiusap po, para matulungan ‘yung contact tracing sa mga public health facilities, paki-ask po ng permission ng COVID-19 patients if they’re willing to disclose their identities to the public,” Nograles said.
(So we urge you, to help with contact tracing in public health facilities, please ask for the permission of COVID-19 patients if they’re willing to disclose their identities to the public.)
The number of coronavirus patients in the country has risen steadily over the past two weeks.
Contact tracing, or identifying persons who had been physically near a patient, is a way of arresting the spread of the virus. Contacts of confirmed cases are urged to self-isolate. If they show symptoms of the disease, they are quarantined as persons under investigation (PUI).
As of Friday, the Philippines has recorded 803 confirmed cases of the virus, with 31 recoveries and 54 deaths. – Rappler.com
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