The tricycle drivers and laundrywomen have long been a part of the UP Visayas community in Miagao since the campus opened in 1989.The drivers ferry faculty, staff and students around the sprawling campus and the town proper. The laundrywomen service the students staying at the dorms as well as residents living in the staff houses.
In these extraordinary times, speed is of the essence. To further accelerate our LGUs’ CoVID-19 response, CoVcheck developed the Quarantine Buddy (QB).
“Communication is important and necessary. People tend to underestimate the importance of communication because it comes easily to most of us. But difficulties communicating brings about frustration and can even strain relationships,” said Michael Valdez, Speech Pathology Chair at the College of Allied Medical Professions (CAMP) at University of the Philippines (UP) Manila. “The need for communicating is also highlighted as everyone is experiencing constant change during this time. It is crucial to establish an understanding of the situation and the changes it brings about to our daily lives. People with communication difficulties tend to feel more left out and confused in times like this.”
The UP Men’s Basketball Team and the San Beda Red Lions were supposed to play exhibition games on March 14 to 15 2020 in Passi City and Iloilo City. On February 5, 2020, iAmUPHi, in partnership with the UPAA Iloilo Chapter and a local sports organizer were finalizing plans for the games including a dinner for the teams at the Casa Real that was to be hosted by Iloilo Provincial Governor Arthur Defensor, Jr. Everybody was busy preparing for the big event. But fate had a bigger plan.
With just more than a week of preparation, the University of the Philippines Philippine General Hospital (UP-PGH) has formally opened its doors as a COVID-19 referral hospital on March 30, 2020. The opening jibed with the launch of the UP-PGH COVID-19 Bayanihan Na! Operations Center on the same day. The Center will entertain COVID-19-related inquiries and donations.
PGH Director Gerardo Legaspi stated during the launch that an initial 130 beds were allotted for confirmed COVID-19 patients. With the help of private and government organizations, six wards were redesigned within one week for the needs of the patients. He thanked D.M. Consunji Inc. and Architect Dan Lichauco for retrofitting two wards despite the hospital’s tight deadline.
With Cebu implementing phased plans for re-opening businesses organizations and public institutions, we developed a tool whose approaches augment what we know works for such set-ups.
Covcheck’s CovidCheck is a monitoring tool built to collect health data of the personnel of business organizations and/or public institutions through daily health self-assessments. It aids in identifying risks before employees, staff, and students alike leave their homes.
Cocolife, the biggest Filipino-owned stock life insurance company, recently donated P1 million to the University of the Philippines Manila – National Institute of Health (UP-NIH) for the purchase of one Real Time- Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) machine to help step-up efforts for coronavirus testing in the country. RT-PCR Machines are used to make a minuscule amount of very distinct viral genetic material detectable, which significantly improves the timely release of COVID-19 test results in the country.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has officially announced its approval of GenAmplifyTM Corona Virus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) RT-PCR Detection Kit on its advisory dated 3 April 2020. This is the first locally-made, PCR-based COVID-19 test kit for commercial use. It was developed by Dr. Raul V. Destura and the scientists of the UP Manila National Institutes of Health (UPM-NIH), with funding from the Department of Science and Technology (DOST). The testing kits will be manufactured by the Manila Health Tek, Inc.
The University of the Philippines released on 23 April 2020 implementing guidelines for proceeding with the Second Semester of Academic Year 2019-2020, which has been affected by the Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) in Luzon and other parts of the country.
With the increasing number of confirmed cases in Metro Cebu, more localised and active identification, surveillance and monitoring of suspect and confirmed cases could aid in stemming the tide of infections. In order to seed a more effective and efficient case finding and monitoring process among barangays, few LGUs in Metro Cebu have started to adopt digital tools that can hasten emergency response.
CoVcheck, an online community-driven web application was launched recently by a team of researchers from the FireCheck Project of the UP Cebu Center for Environmental Informatics led by Aileen Joan Vicente, Asst. Professor at the Department of Computer Science.
