WHO cites PH for keeping Covid-19 deaths low

MANILA, Philippines — Despite close to 11,000 deaths from Covid-19, the World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday gave the Philippines a pat on the back for its coronavirus response, saying it had prevented a much higher number of deaths like those seen in several other countries.

WHO country representative Rabindra Abeyasinghe said the Philippines “wisely” used the extended lockdown imposed in March last year to prepare its health care, testing, quarantine and contact tracing capacity.

Could have been worse

“All these showed you have prepared and used the lockdown wisely to deal with the pandemic and the reflection is that you have managed to prevent a large number of deaths like we have seen in several other countries,” Abeyasinghe said in a media briefing hosted by the Department of Health (DOH).

“Though you still have [more than] 10,000 deaths, if the preparedness and those lockdowns were not used, it could have been well much more than that,” he added.

On Monday, the DOH logged 1,658 additional coronavirus infections and 58 deaths, which brought the overall number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in the country to 527,272 and the death toll to 10,807.

The DOH reported only 27 patients had recovered, raising the total number of Covid-19 survivors to 487,574.

The deaths and recoveries left the country with 28,891 active cases, of which 88.5 percent were mild, 5.3 percent was asymptomatic, 0.56 percent moderate, 2.7 percent severe, and 3 percent critical.

Since Jan. 19, the DOH’s daily reported deaths had averaged 64 and reached a high of 95 on Jan. 27.

Fatalities

The DOH said the high number of daily deaths since mid-January, which has pushed the case fatality rate to 2.05 percent—the highest since Aug. 1—was due to the delayed recording following their validation with the Philippine Statistics Authority.

DOH data as of Jan. 31 showed 62 percent of the 10,669, or 6,652, reported deaths from Covid-19 were people 60 years old and above.

Covid-19 has claimed 153 children 14 years old and below, comprising 1.4 percent of the 10,669 deaths as of Jan. 31.

The fatalities include 83 health-care workers, of whom 33 are doctors and 19 nurses, out of the 14,48 health-care workers who have been infected.

Meanwhile, six out of the 868,436 Filipinos who returned from other countries since the pandemic broke out a year ago have died of Covid-19.

The Philippines ranks 32nd among countries with the highest Covid-19 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.

The tally is topped by the United States with 441,324 deaths, followed by Brazil with 224,504, and Mexico with 158,536.

Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said many deaths from Covid-19 were only being officially recorded now following validation.

Previously reported deaths were not recorded in the official Covid-19 data if the information was not complete.

“With this harmonization work with the Philippine Statistics Authority, which we started this January, we are now reporting high number of deaths. Not all of them died in January but these happened months before,” Vergeire said.

Closed case

Also on Monday, the DOH ruled out transmission of the UK variant of the coronavirus from the first detected case, as all the contacts of the 29-year-old man who arrived from Dubai on Jan. 7 had tested negative for the more contagious variant of the Covid-19 agent.

“We already closed [the case]. It’s already a closed case when it comes to contact tracing,” Vergeire said.

“All those close contacts have been tested, quarantined, monitored. The genome sequencing are all negative” for the UK variant, she added.

She said contact tracers had also found no link between the first case and the 16 other UK variant cases that had been identified. INQ