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The World Health Organization (WHO) believes that the Philippines can still control the spread of new Covid-19 variants through an intensified response from local government units (LGUs) coupled with adherence to minimum public health standards.
According to WHO Country Representative Dr. Rabindra Abeyasinghe, LGUs should lead the effort for early detection, quarantine and granular closures to avoid an increase in cases that could lead to a regional community shutdown like last year.
“We need to go back to ensure that public health measures are fully implemented and that authorities fully implement early detection, early quarantine, case isolation and, if necessary, limited closures. [villages] with the grouping of such cases to prevent further spread, ”Abeyasinghe said at a news conference on Tuesday.
The Department of Health (DoH) blamed an increase in the number of cases in the country on Monday on the failure of the population to meet minimum health standards, a rebound that was aggravated by the presence of B117 or the variant from the United Kingdom and 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 that are being rolled out globally.
Abeyasinghe said the WHO is carefully monitoring the variants that have spread around the world 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 contagion, since 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 transmission chain although the numbers went down…. [there] they were still important
levels of transmission in the community, ”said Abeyasinghe.
It added that determining the community transmission of variants is not possible due to the limited number of variants and that testing of variants remains expensive.
“The number of confirmed variants is limited…. With the limited tests for the variants that are performed, the key problem is interpreting the findings and doing a representative sampling and that is what we are doing with the DoH to strengthen, since it is not possible from an economic point of view the sequencing of the genome variants for each Covid patient. “Abeyasinghe said.
On Tuesday, the country registered 2,668 new cases of Covid-19, bringing the total number of infections to 600,428.
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