COVID-19: The need to heed distress calls of healthcare workers

Despite having the strictest and longest lockdown in the world, COVID-19 cases in the Philippines continue to rise. On August 1, 2020, the country logged almost 5,000 positive cases, its highest count since the onset of the pandemic in February 2020. This brings the total to 98,232 cases, 2,039 of whom have already died.¹

As the Philippines undergoes a new set of quarantine protocols for the first half of August 2020, 60 medical associations have asked for a time-out and sought the national government to revert the Philippine capital, Metro Manila back to a stricter enhanced community quarantine.² These associations cite two main reasons for their plea for a renewed lockdown. They argue that the healthcare system of the nation’s capital has reached a critical level. Given the “seemingly endless number of patients trooping” to hospitals for emergency care and admission, “the healthcare system has been overwhelmed”. As a consequence, they say that healthcare workers have been experiencing fatigue and depression as they “can no longer bear the burden of deciding who lives and who dies”.

Recent correspondences in this journal have urged for interventions necessary to deal with the psychological³, emotional⁴, and spiritual^5,6 well-being of the general public at this time of the pandemic. We find, however, that these interventions should be extended to our healthcare frontliners as well. The Philippines’ healthcare workers are a case in point.

Besides the lack of personal protective equipment, our frontliners are underpaid and do not get the respect they deserve. They answer “to the call of duty while battling fear and anxiety”.⁷ Aside from this, they also experience pressure, stress, insomnia, denial, anger, and fear.⁸ This is of course on top of constant exposure to the virus! In other countries, psychological intervention plans for medical workers have already been enacted through “counselling and psychotherapy based on the stress-adaptation models”.⁹ All over the world though, frontliners may still suffer from “post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and substance use disorders” amid the pandemic.¹⁰ Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, health workers have already been experiencing shift fatigue.¹¹ The current outbreak has magnified it further.

As of the time of this writing, the Philippine government has rejected the call of the medical groups.¹² Some government officials even insisted that a lockdown is no longer necessary since Metro Manila will be “a living experiment”¹³; medical workers should “just do better jobs”¹⁴. Such insensitivity from the government neglects the humanity and dignity of the frontliners who are under duress and are merely seeking relief from the recent avalanche of COVID-19 cases. The Philippines should learn from how Spain and Italy addressed the distress calls of their healthcare workers in March 2020. As the head of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted, “Even if we do everything else right, if we don’t prioritize protecting health workers, many people will die because the health worker who could have saved their lives is sick”.¹⁵