COVID cases still rising – DOH

The country’s positivity rate for COVID-19 went up to 14.8 percent this week from 12.5 percent last week, the Department of Health (DOH) said yesterday.

At the same time, the DOH said it has recorded more than 3,047 cases per day this week, which is 32 percent higher compared to last week’s cases.

At a virtual briefing, Beverly Lorraine Ho, DOH officerin-charge undersecretary of the public health services team, said the National Capital Region (NCR) has the highest daily moving average of 1,100 cases per day.

“This was followed by the rest of Luzon with 700 cases per day, and by the Visayas and Mindanao areas, though the rise in cases here was slow,” Ho said.

Ho clarified though that, nationally, the country will still be under the low risk classification with a daily average attack rate of 2.43 cases per 100,000 population, with all regions showing increase in cases in the recent one to two weeks.

“That is the trend now, though all regions are still under low risk classification,” she added. Ho stressed that while there is an increase in cases, less than 1,000 cases of severe and critical admissions were recorded since middle of March. “The rise in cases didn’t mean rise in hospital admissions,” she said.

As of last Tuesday, 734 cases or 8.32 percent of total admissions were severe and critical. Of the total admissions, 16.49 percent were classified as asymptomatic and 40.97 percent mild.

Ho also revealed that the DOH has recorded 1,997 cases of the highly transmissible Omicron subvariant BA.5 and 154 cases of the subvariant BA.2.12.1 in the country.

“All regions detected the (BA.5) variant except Region 12 and the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao or BARMM,” she said.

She noted that there were 29 cases in Region 1; 59 in Region 2; 46 in Region 3; 13 in Region 5; 252 in Region 6; five in Region 7; one in Region 8; five in Region 9; one in Region 10 and one in Region 11.

Out of the 890 cases, 650 are fully vaccinated, 18 are partially vaccinated while the vaccination status of the remaining 222 still being verified.

“At the moment, the exposure of individuals, travel histories, health status and vaccination status are being verified as well,” Ho said.

Include antigen results

The OCTA Research group yesterday urged the DOH to include antigen test results in the official COVID-19 case counts, noting that fewer reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests are being conducted compared to previous surges.

“During the Delta surge, there were about 300 daily tests per 100,000 people (in NCR). During the Omicron surge in January, testing was really stretched to about 400 per day,” OCTA fellow Guido David said in a webinar organized by the Cardinal Santos Medical Center.

“During the current wave, testing has not really increased that much. It has largely remained at baseline values… The concern here is that the testing is a lot lower compared to the previous wave,” he added, noting that current testing rates rarely reached 100 per day per 100,000 people in the NCR.

David said the actual number of cases may be significantly higher than the reported 2,000 to 3,000 per day because of the low testing rate.

“We’re not saying that there should be more testing necessarily because there are antigen tests being conducted,” David said. “But we’re hoping that data from antigen tests could be incorporated in the numbers that are being reported.”

Under the present guidelines, only positive results from RT-PCR tests are included in regular case reports released by the DOH, even as the cheaper antigen tests became more common in recent months.

OCTA fellow Ranjit Rye expressed support for President Marcos’ pronouncements regarding the health sector during his first State of the Nation Address (SONA). These include sustaining the vaccine and booster programs, revising health protocols and alert systems, building more health centers and hospitals, improving the welfare and hiring more health personnel and ensuring accessibility to cheap and effective medicines.

“All of these disparate initiatives should be part of one comprehensive masterplan as roadmap or blueprint for moving out of the pandemic,” said Rye.