COVID-19 vaccination drive opens to general public in October – Palace

INQUIRER FILE PHOTO/GRIG C. MONTEGRANDE

MANILA, Philippines — Malacañang on Tuesday said President Rodrigo Duterte had approved the rollout in October of COVID-19 vaccines for the general population, including minors.

In a press briefing, presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said Duterte heeded the advice of vaccine czar Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr. to start inoculating minors and the rest of the eligible population by next month since the government did not expect any supply problems.

The Palace official said guidelines would soon be issued on the procedure for inoculating minors and the general population.

Galvez, in his report to the president on Monday night, said that by the end of October, the country would have received at least 100 million vaccine doses and the government was expecting to have administered some 55 million doses by then.

For Metro Manila, Galvez said the goal was to vaccinate at least 85 percent of the target population.

He said other cities outside Metro Manila were also starting to catch up in their vaccination drives after being prioritized in the supplies.

Provinces in the Calabarzon and Central Luzon regions have fully vaccinated between a fourth and a third of their target populations.

Unvaccinated warned

At the Laging Handa public briefing, Quirino Gov. Dax Cua, also the president of the Union of Local Authorities of the Philippines, said that with more vaccines coming in October, he hoped there would be “more balanced and equitable distribution” and that far-flung provinces receive more shots.

Cua also noted that many people preferred Western-made vaccines, but many local governments could not afford to have their own ultracold storage facilities for these jabs for faster distribution.

Meanwhile, President Duterte reiterated his warning that he might use police power to compel unwilling Filipinos to get vaccinated, saying this was the only way to gradually bring the country back to normalcy.

In his press briefing, Roque clarified that the president would wait first for legislation before using police powers for compulsory vaccination.

The President also warned government employees that they might be asked to leave the government if they refused inoculation, especially those at the front lines tasked to transact with people.

Glitch resolved

Also on Tuesday, the Department of Health (DOH) said the technical glitches that prevented the agency from updating the COVID-19 death toll were finally resolved, as it reported 91 more fatalities.

But according to Dr. Alethea De Guzman, director of the DOH epidemiology bureau, the Department of Information and Communications Technology was still “trying to identify what immediate fix can be implemented to expand our server capacity.”

More sustainable fixes were also being explored so “we don’t experience these downtimes frequently,” she added.

In an online briefing, De Guzman said the server of COVIDKaya, the department’s reporting and information management system, was down from Sept. 23 to 26.

The DOH’s daily case bulletin includes data on new cases as well as the number of recoveries, deaths and active infections in the country. However, from Sept. 24 to 26, the DOH was unable to release information on deaths due to technical issues in the server.

De Guzman said the server went down on Sept 23 due to overloading after data was pushed and extracted at the same time. As a result, COVIDKaya reached its server capacity “to handle, receive and process bulk data pushed from the Central Data Repository System.”

This means the DOH had to manually extract the data from the system and since deaths needed to be verified, those statistics were not included in the daily case bulletins from Sept. 24 to 26, she noted.

New cases

On Tuesday, the DOH recorded 13,846 new COVID-19 infections, bringing the total cases to 2,522,965.

The low number of new infections was due to the failure of seven laboratories to submit their data on time, the DOH said.

In its daily case bulletin, the DOH also said there remained 132,139 active cases, of which the majority or 76.6 percent were mild, 0.9 percent in critical condition and 2.1 percent severe.

The DOH also reported 39,980 new recoveries, bringing the total number of survivors to 2,353,140.

The total fatality count also rose to 37,686.

The positivity rate in the country was at 24.1 percent, or nearly one in four of the 47,430 individuals tested on Sunday was positive for the virus.

Meanwhile, the DOH said 76 percent of all beds in the intensive care unit and 68 percent of all COVID-19 ward beds were currently occupied, while 63 percent of all isolation beds and 55 percent of all mechanical ventilators were in use.