Malacañang: Focus on recovery stats as COVID-19 cases breach 1 million
MANILA, Philippines — With COVID-19 cases in the country surpassing one million on Monday, Malacañang appealed to the public to look at the positive statistics culled from the government’s efforts to respond to the pandemic, such as high recovery and low death rates.
“Let us not just look into the one million cases. First, [more than] 900,000 have recovered so the active cases are [less than] 100,000 … The surge in cases, it’s not only happening in the Philippines,” presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said in a press briefing.
Health Secretary Francisco Duque III made a similar appeal on Monday even as the daily number of new cases had remained high over the past weeks. “If there is anything that is worth mentioning at this point is the number of recoveries,” he said.
90% recovery rate
Duque pointed out that the Philippines continued to show a good 90 percent rate of recovery from the viral disease. “I think we should focus on the recoveries more than the total number of affected individuals since [the] majority have already recovered,” he added.
The country’s total number of coronavirus cases was tallied at 1,006,428 on Monday, with 8,929 new cases detected by laboratory tests. Seventy more deaths, including 27 previously tagged as recoveries, brought the toll to 16,853.
The Department of Health (DOH) reported 11,333 mild and asymptomatic cases were considered recovered after a 14-day quarantine, pushing total recoveries to 914,952.
A total of 74,623 people were still actively battling the disease, 95.4 percent of whom were mildly ill, 1.4 percent asymptomatic, 0.87 percent moderately ill, 1.3 percent severely ill, and 1 percent critically ill.
World rankings
In terms of number of active cases, Roque said the country dropped to 27 from 20 in world rankings. The Philippines was No. 133 in the number of cases per one million population and No. 90 in case fatality rate at 1.7 percent, or lower than the world average of 2.2 percent.
As of Monday, Roque said the country was No. 26 in total number of cases and No. 21 in total recoveries.
“So I don’t think it is a negative reflection. On the other hand, based on our world rankings, we can see that we are managing, [even with] the new variants, rather well,” he said.
Confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country stood at 600,000 as of March 9, about seven weeks ago, when cases began to surge in Metro Manila. A month later, the number of confirmed cases has ballooned to 800,000.
In a matter of three weeks, the Philippines became the 26th country in the world to detect more than 1 million COVID-19 cases.
As for the recently imposed lockdowns to stop the spread of COVID-19, Roque noted that the reproduction rate or R naught in Metro Manila had gone down to 0.9151 as of April 21, which, he said, was “indicative” of the “effectiveness” of the two weeks of enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) and two weeks of modified ECQ (MECQ), as well as the enforcement of PDITR (Prevent, Detect, Integrate, Treat and Reintegrate) strategy in communities.
Roque said the national government continued to build quarantine and isolation units as part the initiative to improve health-care capacity, particularly to provide more beds for COVID-19 patients.
Duque led the opening of a 45-bed isolation hub for mild and asymptomatic patients at Eva Macapagal Terminal in South Harbor, Manila.
