ILIGAN CITY (PIA)--During the 5th Regional Health Research Conference held here on Nov. 17, Dr. Brenda Caballero from Bukidnon State University pitched her team’s study entitled "COVID-19 pandemic: Centrality & Modularity”.

Bagging the People's Choice Award of the 3-Minute Pitch to Policymakers, Caballero’s research aims to look into COVID-19 transmission pathways or highways to identify who are the main propagators of the infection. According to her, this is important, in the event that there will be another pandemic wherein the transmission pathways of communicable diseases can be looked into.  

“This is very important because looking into the network, the pathway of a disease, we can curtail or cut it earlier before it spreads nationwide because when we look into the networks, we can actually see that there are provinces that are densely connected together. If they have strong interaction within themselves, we can focus our containment efforts on those areas,” she said.

Caballero said that there is no need to close the border nationwide and that the areas that are influential to the spread of infection must be focused on.

“Very important kaning ilang [This is a very important] initiative to really look into how we are going to present this to policymakers in a way that they will act on it. This is a good step also for researchers that they will be heard by the government and in turn hopefully the government will look into mga evidence-based,” she said.

Caballero also emphasized that crafted policies must be based on evidence noting that there must be a collaboration between policymakers, government and researchers. (LELA/PIA-10/Lanao del Norte)