MANILA - The Philippine government has been unable to keep a lid on the COVID-19 pandemic, a former health secretary said on Friday, warning that the country faces an uphill battle.

"You know we have not controlled it... What I'm saying is we're trying to control it but we are not able to control it and that's why it's an upward curve," Dr. Manuel Dayrit told an online forum organized by the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines (FOCAP).

Despite a months-long lockdown, the novel coronavirus, which causes the COVID-19 respiratory illness, is far from abating, as the country records an average of 3,000 infections per day, he said.

DOH reports 4,040 cases today, the highest since August 30. This brings the total to 252,964 cases of which 62,250 are active.

1,813 cases today are from NCR

42 deaths
- 25 in September, 11 in August
- 15 in NCR
- 4,108 total

566 recoveries, 186,606 total pic.twitter.com/mi1CXWiSER

— Edson (@EdsonCGuido) September 11, 2020

"It could be far worse, but certainly, if your benchmarks are countries like Thailand or Vietnam, we are not doing as well as them," added Dayrit, who headed the health department during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS outbreak in 2003.

As COVID-19 is a "more treacherous" virus compared to SARS, the government is late in its response to rein in the contagion, he said.

"We're pretty late in our pandemic control efforts," he said, particularly on isolating, tracing and treating coronavirus cases.

To win the battle against the virus, the government should be "one step ahead," like what the health department did then during the 2003 outbreak, bringing SARS under control with only a dozen cases and 2 fatalities recorded, Dayrit said.

"The main difference of 2003 and today, in 2003, we prevented the community spread [of SARS]... With COVID-19, the community spread got out of control and propagated," he said.

"It's too late to stop the community transmission. It has spread. What we can only do now is keep working on mitigation," he added.

Asked if the government is on the right track in handling the pandemic, he said: "You can only look at pandemic functions. It was on the right track in increasing testing. It did very poorly with isolation. It's doing not to well with financing."

"I think the government pretty much knows what needs to be done... But doing it, that's the issue. So, it's an issue of implementation, resources and capacity to sustain resources," he added.

Coronavirus cases in the country breached the 250,000-mark Friday, the health department said in its latest bulletin. The nationwide caseload includes 4,108 deaths, 186,606 recoveries and 62,520 active cases.

• COVID-19 cases in PH breach 250,000; additional cases at 4,040