DOH Undersecretary and spokesperson Maria Rosario Vergeire. FILE PHOTO
The Philippines has detected its third case of the Omicron variant of the new coronavirus in a returning overseas Filipino (ROF) from Qatar who had a travel history in Egypt, the Department of Health (DOH) said on Monday.
Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said at a press briefing that the latest case is a 36-year-old unvaccinated man who arrived on Nov. 28 at Mactan-Cebu International Airport via Qatar Airways flight QR 924.
She said the patient, upon arriving in Cebu, was quarantined for a week and tested on Dec. 4, with the result released the following day.
Still in Cebu, he was moved to an isolation facility and stayed there until last Friday when he returned to his hometown in Cavite, where he continues to be under home quarantine as of this reporting.
Vergeire said the patient was currently asymptomatic.
‘Retested’
The ROF’s whole genome sequencing result came out on Saturday.
Vergeire said he tested negative after another reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test on Sunday.
She said the DOH had also identified three close contacts of the ROF.
“We monitored them, they were home quarantined. We already retested them and all of them had negative results,” Vergeire said.
She disclosed further that the DOH is also verifying the test results and health status of all the other passengers of the Qatar flight.
Growth rate
The Philippines confirmed its first two Omicron cases last Wednesday—a 37-year-old Nigerian who arrived from his home country on Nov. 30 and a 48-year-old Filipino who arrived from Japan on Dec. 1.
The country remained under minimal risk classification for COVID-19 even as the DOH said five areas have shown positive one to two-week growth rate of cases.
These areas are Iligan City, Olongapo City and the provinces of Camiguin, Tawi-Tawi and Aklan, Vergeire said.
Iligan City, which recorded a two-week positive growth rate of 237.5 percent, is classified as “moderate risk” of COVID-19 transmission, while the rest are at “low risk,” she said.
The department is still investigating the cause of the increase in cases in these areas, she added.
“These areas remain to be under alert level 2. Please note that the large growth rate may be affected by small baseline numbers of these areas,” Vergeire said.
But she also said this should not be a cause for alarm as the DOH continued to monitor these developments.
Low risk
On the other hand, all areas remained at low risk in terms of average daily attack rates (Adar) and total bed utilization, Vergeire said.
She noted that the rest of the country, being under minimal risk classification, had a negative two-week growth rate of -51 percent and an Adar of 0.32 per 100,000 individuals.
Data also showed that the National Capital Region recorded a negative two-week growth rate of 47 percent and an Adar of 0.58 per 100,000.
According to Vergeire, national admissions are also on a slow decline, while the number of severe cases showed a sharp decline since end of October.
As of Sunday, intensive care unit (ICU) admissions were lower by 60 percent, or 1,128, compared with the data some six months ago.
Virus update
The DOH on Monday still reported “low” COVID-19 cases at 263, but with 17 laboratories failing to submit their results.
According to the department, four nonoperational laboratories and 13 other labs failed to submit their data to the COVID-19 Document Repository System on Saturday.
Based on data in the last two weeks, the 17 laboratories normally account for 7.8 percent of the samples tested and 4.1 percent of positive individuals.
The country’s positivity rate remained at 0.8 percent, or 228, out of the 28,438 who were tested on Saturday.
Active cases, or the number of individuals who are still sick, stood at 9,592 or 0.3 percent of the country’s total of 2,837,730.
Of these cases, 3,569 were mild, 1,797 severe and 378 were critical.
There were 390 people who recovered, bringing the total number of survivors to 2,777,354.
The death toll climbed to 50,784 with 45 new fatalities. But only nine of the reported deaths were in December, and the rest were between March last year, the start of the pandemic, and November this year.
These figures were encoded late in the COVIDKaya case collection system, the DOH said.
Monday’s case bulletin showed that 21 percent of the country’s ICU beds and 10 percent of mechanical ventilators were in use.