House panels OK reso on unified nat’l contact tracing protocol

MANILA – A resolution urging the Covid-19 Inter-Agency Task Force of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID) to establish a unified national contact tracing protocol hurdled committee level at the House of Representatives.

During a joint hearing on Tuesday, the House Committees on Health and on Information and Communications Technology adopted House Resolution No. 1536, which calls for a unified national contact tracing protocol to ensure a more effective health emergency data monitoring system in the country.

Under the resolution, the proposed contact tracing protocol shall include the designation of a government agency or body as the centralized repository of information to facilitate a faster health emergency response system.

The resolution states that the protocol should also include the secure and encrypted transmission of data, a unified data procedure for solution providers; compliance with Republic Act 10173 or the Data Privacy Act of 2012 in the handling of data; and the provision of real-time data access to accredited contact tracing app providers.

Speaker Lord Allan Velasco, the author of the resolution, stressed the need to strengthen the government’s contact tracing efforts using the most effective and safest system to further boost its response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Contact tracing is a public health strategy to dramatically decrease the impact of an epidemic or pandemic that has been used for years to combat communicable diseases such as the Ebola outbreak in 2014, and the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003,” Velasco said.

In November last year, the IATF-EID issued a resolution designating StaySafe.ph as the government’s contact tracing application of choice, making its use mandatory in all national government agencies and instrumentalities and local government units (LGUs).

Velasco cited data showing that the Philippines is only able to identify at least seven contacts per coronavirus-infected person when the ideal contact tracing ratio should be 1:35 for urban areas and 1:30 for rural communities.