DOH will be more area specific in reporting COVID-19 cases

MANILA, Philippines – The Department of Health (DOH) has updated its reports of the areas where the highest number of COVID-19 cases are recorded to ensure that local officials can implement an “immediate response” to contain the spread of the coronavirus in their communities.

Undersecretary of Health María Rosario Vergeire said Monday that DOH chose to be more specific in identifying where new infections had been included, as it also wanted the public to be better informed so that the “local response is implemented immediately “.

“This also helps provide information to our local government units so that there is accountability,” Vergeire said.

Since the start of the local outbreak in March, DOH had broken down daily cases by province. Metro Manila, as the epicenter of the outbreak in the country, was always in the lead.

Not in a similar situation

But Vergeire said the 16 cities and one municipality in the capital region were not in a similar situation, with only a few localities reporting large numbers of cases.

The DOH data showed that two cities, Caloocan and Las Piñas, had a virus attack rate of less than 1 percent. The attack rate takes into account the number of infections over the total population in a given area.

While Quezon City, Manila, Caloocan, Pasig, and Makati have the highest number of active cases, the virus attack rate in these cities is less than 2 percent. Pateros, San Juan and Navotas had the highest attack rate of at least 2.05 percent.

Vergeire said DOH began breaking down cases by city in Metro Manila over the weekend and the same format would soon be applied to other provinces.

Also for accountability

“Similar to what we have done with our quarantine levels, we want our approach to be granular for purposes of accountability and targeted interventions,” he said.
On Monday, DOH listed 2,638 additional cases of COVID-19, bringing the national count to 359,169. Of the recently reported cases, 1,932 became ill between October 6 and 19, while 376 became ill in September.

Quezon City had the highest number of new infections with 141, followed by the provinces of Cavite (140), Laguna (128), Batangas (120) and Rizal (108).

A total of 310,303 patients have recovered from the disease so far, with the addition of 226 patients. But the death toll rose to 6,675 when 26 patients succumbed to the severe respiratory illness: 15 this month, two in September, five in August and four in July.

Six of the deaths were from Metro Manila, four from Soccsksargen, three from Zamboanga, two from Western Visayas, Eastern Visayas, and Calabarzon, and one from Ilocos, Central Luzon, North Mindanao, Davao, the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, and the Cordillera Administrative Region.

The residence of one of the fatalities is still being verified.

Recoveries and deaths left the country with 42,191 active cases, of which 83.1 percent are mild, 11.3 percent asymptomatic, 2.1 percent severe, and 3.6 percent critical.

While the country’s positivity rate, or the percentage of people who tested positive, dropped slightly from 10.03 percent last week to 9.87 percent, the DOH said the number still “needs to improve.” as it remained above the World Health Organization benchmark of less than 5 percent.

As of noon Monday, the 147 accredited laboratories had tested a total of 4,136,389 patients for COVID-19.

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