A HEALTH official has acknowledged the “Number 20” ranking to which the Philippines climbed in terms of the number of Covid-19 cases, but explained that simply quoting this, without noting the real active cases and the consistently low death rate, does not paint a full, accurate picture of the pandemic’s situation in the country.
Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said the report from Johns Hopkins University putting the Philippines in the world’s Top 20 countries with the most number of Covid-19 cases is based only on the “cumulative” number of cases.
“We would have to look at the number of active cases, the recoveries and the deaths. When we look at our recovery rate we are already at 80 percent or more. When we look at the case fatality it is stable less than 2 percent,” Vergeire said in an online media forum.
She pointed out,” So it is not really just the numbers. We have to look at other variables. We have to focus on the active cases and not the cumulative number of cases.”
She cited various interventions that helped improve the country’s Covid-19 response like expanded testing capacity that already reached to about 3.5 million tests, health system capacity and contact tracing efforts.
“Although we have clusters of cases in specific areas in the country, so, yes the number may increase but we have to look at on how we are faring in our response [to Covid-19],” she added.
“Similar to the decreasing trend in the national level, we continue to record a lower cases in the National Capital Region, from 16,000 weekly cases last August 6 to 12, it went down to 3,772 weekly cases as of September 28,” she emphasized.
As of 4 p.m. of October 2, the DOH reported the total number of Covid-19 cases at 316,678 after 2,611 newly-confirmed cases were logged.
Of the confirmed cases, 56,445 (17.8 percent) are active cases, 254,617 (80.4 percent) have recovered and 5,616 (1.8 percent) have died.
The top regions with cases in the recent two weeks were NCR (870 or 40 percent), Region 4A (400 or 19 percent), and Region 6 (255 or 12 percent).
There were 416 recoveries and 56 deaths.