INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Health (DOH) on Saturday ended its monitoring of firework-related injuries in the country with a total tally of 609 people hurt from firecracker use, including a few caused by indiscriminate firing, during the recent holiday festivities.
The figure is a sharp increase by 98 percent compared with the reported cases last year when a total of 307 individuals were wounded during the New Year revelry.
For its latest case bulletin from 6 a.m. of Jan. 5 to 5:59 a.m. on Jan. 6, the health department confirmed nine new cases, all of which were wounded due to firecrackers.
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Of the total count, 601 cases were due to active or passive involvement in firecracker use. One was due to the ingestion of “watusi.” Seven others were victims of stray bullets due to indiscriminate firing.
About half of the fireworks-related injuries, or 52 percent, happened in Metro Manila.
The Ilocos region followed at 10 percent, Calabarzon at 8 percent, and Central Luzon at 7 percent.
The majority of the injuries, or 74 percent, were due to blasts or burns while 26 percent had eye injuries, including one case that led to blindness. About a third had severe burns that eventually led to amputation.
The official count, the DOH noted, may still change in the coming days, as it continues to validate with the Philippine National Police reports of stray bullet injuries.
In a message to reporters, health deputy spokesperson Albert Domingo attributed the surge in injuries to the lifting of pandemic restrictions.
“We see this Yuletide season as the first one without any pandemic restrictions at all. It could be because of this renewed freedom to gather and celebrate that more people chose to use fireworks more,” he said.
Domingo, however, stressed that “this remains to be a hypothesis that must be subjected to further study.”
In 2020, the first year of the global health crisis due to COVID-19, firecrackers-related injuries in the Philippines dropped by 70 percent to 123 cases from the 413 cases reported in the previous year.