Joint influenza preparedness planning and swift inter-agency action enabled a quick response to COVID-19 in the Philippines, buying the country’s health system much-needed time to prepare for an inevitable surge in cases.

The first death from COVID-19 outside China was reported in the Philippines on 1 February 2020. The event quickly prompted an interagency contingency planning workshop to agree priorities for government interventions. The workshop, held on 27–28 February 2020 included participants from the departments of health, agriculture, natural resources, interior and local governance, education, social welfare and development, public works, trade, transport, foreign affairs and justice, as well as representatives from the Office of Civil Defense, the police, the armed forces, the Philippine Red Cross, UNICEF and WHO.

The same group of agencies had come together several months before, in November 2019, to test the country’s Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Plan through a tabletop exercise. The lessons learnt from that joint exercise, and the recommendations issued by participants to strengthen pandemic preparedness, were to be used to update the plan in 2020 but have since also proved invaluable in informing the Philippine government’s approach to COVID-19. 

For example, the inter-agency connections forged in November enabled the Department of Health to identify and convene the right stakeholders quickly and effectively in February and cement working relationships. This greatly facilitated the activation of an Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID), led by the Secretary of Health, to coordinate the country’s COVID-19 response. Similarly, the awareness around responding to pandemic influenza that was built among government stakeholders in November enabled the quick identification of priority interventions and their rapid adoption in February and March. One of those interventions was a strict lockdown imposed from 13 March, which prevented significant morbidity and mortality by slowing the spread of disease during the early days of the COVID-19 crisis and allowing the country to prepare its health system for the inevitable surge in cases that came on easing restrictions in June 2020.  

Pandemic influenza preparedness has also provided the platform for laboratory capacities in the Philippines’ COVID-19 response. Thanks to capacity strengthening provided through the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (PIP) Partnership Contribution, all five of the government’s dedicated influenza laboratories were able to quickly convert into COVID-19 laboratories; and testing capacity has been steadily growing since. The Philippines currently has 220 COVID-accredited laboratories that combined can test up to 70,000 samples per day. 

Photo caption: Participants at the interagency contingency planning workshop in February 2020. 

Photo credit: WHO

Disclaimer: This image was taken during a time of no community transmission of COVID-19. Community transmission is defined as the inability to relate confirmed cases through chains of transmission for a large number of cases, or by increasing positive tests through sentinel samples (routine systematic testing of respiratory samples from established laboratories). Preventative measures such as mask wearing and physical distancing should be used to prevent the spread of COVID-19.