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The Department of Health (DoH) “expects” an increase in cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) in mid-January.
The Undersecretary of Health, María Rosario Vergeire, attributed the increase to the return to normal operation of the testing laboratories.
Some labs were closed and fewer patients flocked to labs for swabs over the Christmas holidays, resulting in a drop in tests performed, which consequently led to lower-case numbers.
“We are waiting, if and when this increase [of cases] it would really happen, we will go out in mid-January to bring out the increase in cases and the increase (which seems to increase in mid-January), ”Vergeire said in a briefing on Monday.
“We wait for the return to normality and now we can observe the real trend and the number of cases since all the laboratories will be fully operational,” he added.
Vergeire noted that the daily presentation of laboratory results during the Christmas season dropped to 22,000 from an average of 36,000.
The fewer tests resulted in a 5 percent drop in the number of positive Covid cases nationwide.
Vergeire also said that genome sequencing results for the novel coronavirus variant will be available on Wednesday or Thursday.
The variant, first detected in the UK and believed to be more contagious, has not reached the country until now, according to an analysis of samples taken in October.
Experts from the Philippine Genome Center, the DoH Office of Epidemiology, the Tropical Medicine Research Institute, and the University of the Philippines-National Institutes of Health are analyzing samples of hospitalized patients and newcomers from countries with reported cases of the new variant, which gave positive for the new strain from November to December.
Since then, the country has banned travelers from the UK and 19 other countries.
As of Monday, the Philippines had a total of 478,761 cases, of which 21,219 were active, with 448,279 recoveries and 9,263 deaths.
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