Local governments and hospitals scrambled to secure supplies of medical oxygen as the demand for it rose in the Northern Mindanao region that saw newly documented COVID-19 cases reaching over a thousand in a single day on Saturday, September 11.
In Bukidnon, a province that accounted for 62.9% of the region’s new cases, Valencia City Vice-Mayor Policarpio Murillo IV called on the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) to regulate the distribution of tanks of oxygen, especially to other places outside the region.
“This is not to be greedy, but this regulation can ensure the region’s oxygen requirement these days,” said Murillo, a physician by profession.
He warned that Northern Mindanao cities and provinces would suffer more as the demand for medical oxygen goes higher.
Murillo said Valencia City has found a supplier from Cotabato City, but another from Davao City has already turned down requests from cities and provinces outside the Davao region.
Murillo said a major source of medical oxygen in Northern Mindanao has reportedly been supplying Cebu in the Visayas.
“In this case, the DTI should come in to regulate the oxygen supply of Northern Mindanao,” Murillo told Rappler.
Murillo’s city is the commercial and trading center of Bukidnon where surges in COVID-19 infections and patients needing hospitalization have started overstretching the public health care system.
On Saturday, Bukidnon accounted for 639 of Northern Mindanao’s 1,015 newly documented COVID-19 cases, data from the Department of Health (DOH) in Region 10 showed.
Bukidnon also accounted for 53 of the 75 COVID-19-related deaths in the region on the same day.
The Bukidnon Inter-Agency Task Force on COVID-19, in its meeting on Thursday, September 9, expressed alarm over the supply and rising demand for medical oxygen in the province.
The province’s eight public hospitals, including the Bukidnon Provincial Medical Center (BPMC) in Malaybalay City, require around 7,422 tanks of medical oxygen per quarter for their COVID-19-stricken patients.
The problem now is that the major source of medical oxygen in the region – Pryce Gases Inc. in Tagoloan town in Misamis Oriental – committed to supplying only 60% of that.
The Valencia city hall bought five high-flow oxygen machines to meet the requirements of its isolation center, the city’s ambulances, and birthing facility. Each machine requires 75 liters of liquid oxygen a day.
Until late August, Murillo said, Valencia was doing well because its 120 50-pound cylinder medical oxygen requirement per day was met.
He said the city government even bought 100 cylinders more to prepare for more COVID-19 cases.
But “in the last two weeks, the deliveries from Tagoloan became erratic,” and only as much as 75% of the cylinder requirements were secured.
“The manufacturer requested us to get our supply from their plant because they could no longer deliver due to the rising demand,” Murillo said.
When they did on Wednesday, September 8, the manufacturer in Tagoloan said it had run out of supplies for them.
Murillo said the situation has gotten worse that some residents have gone to the extent of borrowing oxygen cylinders from city hall. In the process, some were lost.
Oxygen cylinder theft has also become a problem.
“What we’re doing now is to refill oxygen cylinders. We don’t lend the cylinders anymore,” he said.
Valencia City has recorded a total of 4,533 COVID-19 cases and 119 deaths from 2020 to September 10. The Philippine Genome Center has so far detected two cases of Delta, one Alpha, and another Beta variant in the city.
Valencia has been placed under general community quarantine (GCQ) classification with heightened restrictions from September 8 to September 23.
Valencia Mayor Azucena Huervas said the COVID-19 wards of hospitals, and the city’s treatment and isolation facilities were already full due to the increasing number of COVID-19 cases.
Huervas said the number of cases has “also put an extraordinary burden on our doctors, nurses, contact-tracers, and all the other frontline and health workers.”
Murillo said the city’s health workers would now go house-to-house with vaccines and check for household members with COVID-19 symptoms.
Murillo said those with symptoms would be tested right away.
The strategy would be pilot-tested in four of Valencia’s 31 barangays.
Murillo said the strategy could help ease the burden of hospitals because early detection would mean immediate treatment in the city hall’s facilities.
“They don’t have to reach the level of gasping for air or hospitalization because their symptoms are managed earlier in the isolation centers or their homes,” he said. – Rappler.com
Grace Cantal-Albasin is a Mindanao-based journalist and an awardee of the Aries Rufo Journalism Fellowship
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