PH already flattening COVID-19 curve despite testing backlogs, expert says
Amedical expert said the Philippines is already flattening the curve despite backlogs in coronavirus test results. Dr. Teodoro Herbosa, special adviser to the National Task Force on COVID-19 and executive vice president of the University of the Philippines, revealed this Monday, saying the country's number of deaths is decreasing and is much smaller than the fatalities in other cities in the world.
“Let’s say NCR (National Capital Region) with less than a thousand deaths and you compare that to New York City or you compare that to Lombardi in Italy, their deaths is in the thousands. That to us is a success of the early intervention of the ECQ (enhanced community quarantine) and behavior of the society. I think there are other parameters that we should look at, not only the delayed results in testing. We should also look at all the other parameters which are good,” Herbosa said in an interview over ANC on Monday.
“Our curve is flattening, that’s what I can tell you. I’ve seen the curve in international comparisons and we’re actually flattening the curve. We’re not the best curve in the Asian region but it’s actually lower than Indonesia. The other countries are doing much better only because their health systems are different than ours,” he added.
He pointed out that the Philippine healthcare system is now able to cope with the new cases of coronavirus and has become better at treating it.
“The number of recoveries every day is increasing. The number of deaths per day is also decreasing. The doubling time is I think 10 days already before the number of cases doubles,” Herbosa said.
However, he explained that flattening the curve “does not mean the disease is already gone.”
“The disease is still there, there is still transmission, and we still find the reproductive level, I think we are still at 0.9. Less than 1 already, another good sign, but the fact that there is still reproduction happening, the fight isn’t over. We need zero transmission, zero deaths, and zero new cases,” he said.
He further explained that the data backlog being experienced by the Department of Health is “more of a data quirk” that makes the DOH unable to catch up with the number of confirmation tests that still needs to be validated.
“Samples like repeating of names or similar names were actually mentioned so there is a delay in actual input,” the medical adviser said.
“For us, in the implementation, it’s very important to actually be able to get the real results. Anyway, the true number of cases would be somewhere between the two numbers. That’s usually the fact in statistical collection or data collection,” he also said.
“What we would like to express is really the importance now that we are doing a lot of testing, that’s the positive part of that incident that we are now getting more test results. We are seeing positive results are going down actually. That’s the positive part of that story,” he noted.