Duque sees slower virus infection risk

Francisco Duque III FILE PHOTO

Health Secretary Francisco Duque III has expressed confidence that the country may soon be moving to “low-risk” COVID-19 case classification even as his department on Thursday reported 4,575 new COVID-19 cases, the third straight day the tally fell below 5,000.

The country remains at moderate risk case classification, the Department of Health (DOH) said on Wednesday.

“For the entire country, the two-week growth rate of -60 percent is at low risk already. The transmission has slowed down,” Duque said at a televised press briefing.

“But our current average daily attack rate (Adar) is still high risk, it’s 9.64 per 100,000 population. But soon … it’s declining already. If it continues to drop, around or less than seven cases per 100,000 population daily, which is moderate risk, then we will be under low risk nationwide. And then we can already deescalate,” he added.

Adar is the average number of new cases in a period out of 100,000 individuals.

Still follow protocols

Duque reiterated the importance of vaccination and compliance with health and safety protocols for cases to continue to decline and prevent the reversal of trends.

Thursday’s cases were higher than the 3,651 infections reported on Wednesday.

But the positivity rate was 15.1 percent, lower than the 16.5 percent reported the previous day. This was based on 36,407 people tested on Tuesday.

The positivity rate refers to the percentage of tests conducted that came out positive for COVID-19. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) benchmark positivity rate of below 5 percent, sustained for two weeks, indicates that virus transmission is under control.

Western Visayas topped the regions with the most number of cases with 451, followed by Central Visayas with 400, and National Capital Region with 392.

NCR now low riskIndependent pandemic monitor OCTA Research said the NCR is now classified as “low risk” for COVID-19 transmission as the number of cases and other indicators continued to decline.

OCTA fellow Guido David, in a post on Twitter, noted that the seven-day case average fell to 945 daily from 2,525 per day.

The reproduction number or infection rate in the NCR also decreased to 0.25 from 0.41 a week earlier.

The reproduction number refers to the number of people infected by one case. A reproduction number below one indicates that the transmission of the virus is slowing down.

David also noted that the region’s positivity rate went down to 9.1 percent from the previous 15 percent, while Adar improved to 6.67 per 100,000 people from 17.83 per 100,000 population.

Meanwhile, OCTA also said the NCR’s hospital utilization improved to 30 percent from 37 percent, while the intensive care unit utilization rate was down to 32 percent from 40 percent the previous week.

The DOH COVID-19 tally on Thursday did not include figures from five laboratories that failed to submit data to the COVID-19 Document Repository System, the DOH said.

The national caseload, according to DOH data, was now 3,627,575.

A total of 3,461 or 76 percent of the new cases occurred in the last two weeks, from Jan. 28 to Feb. 10.

The DOH said there were 93,307 active cases. Of the total, 85,244 were mild, 3,316 asymptomatic, 2,991 moderate, 1,444 severe and 312 critical.

The 7,504 recoveries brought the total number of survivors to 3,479,485.

The 94 fatalities raised the death toll to 54,783, the DOH said. It said the 66 deaths occurred this month, while the rest happened between June 2021 and January 2022 but were reported only on Thursday.

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