April 27, 2020
THE PHILIPPINE ALERT BULLETIN NO. 2020-23
COVID-19: GCQ allows some businesses to open
Last Friday, President Rodrigo Duterte approved the extension of enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) in select ‘high-risk areas’ in the Philippines until May 15 to contain the transmission of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Meanwhile, other areas with ‘moderate-risk’ and ‘low-risk’ have been placed under a less stringent general community quarantine (GCQ), where some businesses will now be allowed to operate.
According to Acting Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Chua, the government assessed the new quarantine measures using two factors: case doubling rate and critical utilization rate. Case doubling rate is the measure of how fast COVID-19 cases doubles while critical utilization rate evaluates the capacity of the local health system to respond to the crisis such as the number of hospital equipment, ICU, ventilators, or isolation rooms.
High-risk areas are provinces or cities which have huge number of cases or do not have enough hospital equipment to accommodate the rising number of cases. Moderate areas are those which are either close to ending or beyond outbreak mode, while low-risk areas are those that have few or no infections.
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