WHILE the number of infections surged to 93,354 on Friday as the country logged yet again a large daily spike in Covid cases at 4,063, the Department of Health (DOH) insisted that the strategy that resulted in its report of a “mass recovery” the day before is science-based.
In a media forum, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said the huge number of recoveries recorded is due to enhanced data reconciliation efforts with local government units through “Oplan Recovery”.
Vergeire said that the clinical recovery protocol — where mild and asymptomatic patients are tagged as recovered after 14 days of quarantine — is followed by the US CDC, European CDC, and India.
She also stressed that only those who were cleared by doctors were declared as recovered.
Meanwhile, she said, the RT-PCR is “basis for infection” and, while it signals a person is infected, it is not an effective way to determine the recovery of the infected person.
“There was even a case who, after 55 days, was still testing positive but is no longer infectious,” Vergeire revealed, partly in Filipino. Recently, Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel Zubiri, a Covid-19 survivor in March, had called on the DOH to further lay down clear protocols on the treatment of recovered persons, to spare them from undue anxiety and stigma.
Zubiri made the call after an RT-PCR test done on him at the Lung Center, hours before President Duterte delivered his State of the Nation Address (Sona), came back with a “positive” result, forcing him to right away go back into isolation, and cancelling his plan to attend the Sona. However, when he took a second RT-PCR test at the Philippine Red Cross, he tested negative for an active infection. This bore out doctors’ advisories that a test could still detect traces of dead virus cells, which are no longer infective, in recovered persons like him.
Surveillance and Quick Action Unit
In a statement on Friday, the DOH said it created the Covid-19 Surveillance and Quick Action Unit early this month. It focuses on data collection, validation and reconciliation of information available at the local and national levels, through the COVIDKaya platform.
The DOH claimed that these massive data reconciliation efforts have “resulted in faster and more accurate tagging of health statuses, particularly on deaths and recoveries.”
It continued: “Data on recovery reconciliations will be reported every 15 days. The reconciliation activity resulted in over 3,000 identified recoveries from July 12 to 14. On July 15, the data team implemented a ‘mass recovery’ adjustment wherein all mild and asymptomatic cases have been re-tagged as recovered with endorsement from the regional offices, which resulted in around 5,000 additional recoveries.”
Following Department Memorandum No. 2020-0258, as endorsed by clinical practice guidelines and the DOH technical advisory groups, patients with mild or no symptoms are tagged as recovered 14 days from the date of onset of symptoms or by date specimen collection.
“Current recovery policies now show that at the 10th day of illness, the risk of transmitting the virus to other people is significantly reduced. This clinical recovery protocol is followed by the US CDC, European CDC, and India,” said DOH.
The DOH explained that interim guidelines provide that asymptomatic confirmed cases, or those who never experienced any symptoms or showed any signs of being sick, must follow the 14-day isolation management protocols in clinical practice guidelines, reckoned from the day of swab testing, with Day 1 as the date after specimen collection.
Covid cases
As of 4 p.m. of July 31, the DOH said that there were 165 recoveries. This brings the total number of recoveries to 65,178.
Of the 4,063 additional cases reported today, 3,813 (94 percent) occurred in July. The top regions with cases in July were: National Capital Region: 2,153 cases (56 percent); Region 7: 558 cases (15 percent); Region 4A: 492 cases (13 percent).
Forty deaths were recorded. The death toll stood at 2,023.
Of the 40 deaths, 27 (68 percent) happened in July, 2 (5 percent) in June, 2 (5 percent) in May, 7 (18 percent) in April, and 2 (5 percent) in March. Deaths were from NCR (13 or 33 percent), Region 7 (12 or 30 percent), Region 3 (7 or 18 percent), Region 4A (2 or 5 percent), Region 6 (2 or 5 percent), Region 11 (2 or 5 percent), Region 4B (1 or 2.5 percent), and Region 9 (1 or 2.5 percent).
There were 83 duplicates that were removed from the total case count. Of these, 42 recovered cases have been removed.
Meanwhile, Vergeire said they have updated the health status of nine cases previously reported as recovered but after final validation were deaths and active cases.
“These numbers undergo constant cleaning and validation,” the DOH said.
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