LGUS KEY TO LICKING COVID VARIANTS – WHO

HE World Health Organization (WHO) believes that the Philippines can still control the spread of new Covid-19 variants through intenSIfiED RESPONSE FROM LOCAL GOVERNMENT units (LGUs) coupled with compliance with minimum public health standards.

TAccording to WHO Country Representative Dr. Rabindra Abeyasinghe, the LGUs should lead in the effort on early detection, quarantine and granular lockdowns to prevent increase in cases that may lead to a regional community lockdown just like last year.

“We need to go back to ensuring that public- health measures are fully implemented and that the authorities fully implement the early detection, early quarantining, isolation of cases and, if necessary, limited lockdowns in [villages] with clustering of such cases to prevent further spread,” Abeyasinghe said in a news briefing on Tuesday.

The Department of Health (DoH) on Monday blamed an increase in the number of cases in the country on the public’s noncompliance with the minimum health standards, an uptick that was aggravated by the presence of the B117 or the United Kingdom variant and the B1351 or the South African variant of the virus.

Both variants have higher transmission rates and, in the case of the South African variant, may affect the efficacy of vaccines being rolled out globally.

Abeyasinghe said the WHO is carefully monitoring the variants that have spread across the globe by working with different research institutions to understand how they act.

He added that the current increase in the number of cases does not constitute a “second wave” of infection, as the region did not experience a true “flattening of the curve” or a decrease in the number of cases specifically in the National Capital Region (NCR or Metro Manila).

“I would not classify this as a second wave... We should have seen a flattening of the curve and in the case of NCR, we did not see a flattening. We always knew that there is a thick chain of transmission although the numbers went down .... [there] were still significant levels of transmission in the community,” Abeyasinghe said.

He added that determination of community transmission of the variants is not possible because of the limited number of variants and that the testing for the variants remains expensive.

“The number of variants confirmed is limited .... With limited testing for variants being done, the key issue is interpreting the findings and doing representative sampling and that is what we are doing with the DoH to strengthen, as it is not possible in an economic standpoint variant genome sequencing for every Covid patient,” Abeyasinghe said.

On Tuesday, the country logged 2,668 new cases of Covid-19, pushing the total number of infections to 600,428.