Pres. Duterte was correct in easing up the quarantine against COVID-19

At first glance, the people who are craving for mass testing before easing up the quarantines seems logical and on-point. 

But, they do need to define first the mass testing that they are craving for. If they want to test everyone in the country and that will be the only thing that will suffice them, then they are looking for something that is useless.

Testing everyone is not fool-proof because of the fact that the RT-PCR tests, and even the other type of tests, will be having false-results. 

Those false-results will be dangerous because a person with the virus and got tested in the first three days of the incubation period of the virus, has a high chance of not being detected. So, just imagine those people having false-confidence and mingling with a lot of their relatives and friends, believing that they do not have the virus.

A false-positive is also bad because the government will need to spend on contact-tracing, treatment and quarantine for someone who is not actually a holder of the virus. 

People seem to think that mass-testing is one of the ingredients of successfully overcoming the first wave. That is not true. 

What we need to do is Enhanced-Targeted-Testing. It is the testing and tracing of all the people that are at risk because of having symptoms or being connected to someone who tested positive. Just like what Korea did. READ HERE

Philippines is already doing that. It is true that the execution could have been much better. We should have tried to expand our capacity more.

Nevertheless, we are doing enough to open up now our country. We need to open up the country to give some leeway to our poor countrymen in finding food for their table. We should realize that letting the government feed the majority of our people for a very long time will be disastrous to the health of the economy and our government finances and that could result in deaths. 

We should also stop believing that pushing our number of confirmed cases per day to zero will make the virus disappear. Asymptomatic patients will always be there and that is one of the factors why China is experiencing the 2nd wave. 

So overall, our president and his government made the right call in easing up the quarantine. They are now trusting us to do our part. The question is, will you do yours?