28-FOLD COVID SPIKE FEARED IF VARIANTS SPREAD

IF “variants of concern” become dominant, an official of the Department of Health (DOH) on Wednesday warned that cases will increase by “28 times” instead of just three times after a month.

This, as University of the Philippines Prof. Guido David of the OCTA Research Team also warned that the Covid-19 cases in Metro Manila would increase to 16,000 daily on April 16, 2021, if the spread of the virus is not mitigated.

Dr. Alethea de Guzman, OIC Director III of the DOH Epidemiology Bureau, said that their aim is not to reach that situation— cases rising 28-fold—for if that happens, the health system will be “overwhelmed”.

De Guzman said that, of the samples sequenced by the Philippine Genome Center, only 6.6 percent were confirmed to be cases of the B.1.1.7 (UK variant) and the B.1.351 (South Africa variant).

She said that 15 cities in the National Capital Region (NCR) were affected with a variant of concern (B.1.1.7) with 39 cases. The UK variant was also recorded in the Cordillera Administrative Region (41), Central Luzon (2), Calabarzon (4) and in Northern Mindanao (1).

Meanwhile, she said that NCR recorded 64 cases of B.1.351, Cagayan Valley (2), and Northern Mindanao (1).

“Seventy-four or 27 percent of these cases were incoming international travelers,” she said.

As of March 16, De Guzman said, “We have reached the peak we saw last July.”

“We are reporting 2.5 times higher new cases this March versus start of January; increasing percent of workplace clusters,” she added.

While the variants of concern have markedly led to the case spikes, she said, “we have seen this upward trend before their detection.

“It’s not a question of what else should be done but how correctly and consistently should we do these prevention and control measures,” she said, adding that it may take the next two to three weeks to see if measures will lead to significant, continuous case decline.

The DOH official also noted that it takes not one but “all local government units, regions, establishments and workplaces to significantly push down our numbers.”

The Covid-19 cases in the country surged to 635,689 after 4,387 additional cases were logged on Wednesday.