AMID the surge in Covid-19 cases in the National Capital Region (NCR) and surrounding provinces, the government decided to extend by another week the enhanced community quarantine classification (ECQ) in the so-called “NCR Plus” bubble.
In an announcement on state PTV on Saturday, Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) recommended in its latest meeting to prolong the lockdown, heeding the recommendation of health experts in and out of government.
He said President Duterte already approved the IATF recommendation.
The extended ECQ will be from April 5 until April 11, 2021, and cover the areas under the so-called NCR plus, which includes Metro Manila, Laguna, Cavite, Bulacan and Rizal.
During the said period, the government will intensify its prevention, detection, isolation, tracing and reintegration (PDITR) operations to arrest the spread of infection within their jurisdiction.
“Because of this we will require local government to have a daily monitoring so we could determine the result of our intensified PDITR,” Roque said.
He said local government officials would also be required to conduct house-to-house visits to ensure any infected person within the said household is tested and isolated.
QI facility
To address the diminishing number of facilities for Covid-19 patients in NCR, Roque said a new 110-bed facility in Quezon Institute in Quezon City will soon be operational to accommodate patients with moderate to severe Covid-19 symptoms.
“After this one week [extension], if we will prove that our PDITR is working, we may implement an MECQ (modified enhanced community quarantine] next week,” Roque said.
Prior to the extension, the duration of the ECQ in NCR plus should have been from March 29 to April 4, 2021.
The IATF made the decision as the number of daily new Covid-19 cases breached the 8,000 mark.
On April 3, 2021, the Department of Health registered an additional 12,576 Covid-19 infections nationwide.
Octa backs ECQ extension
The OCTA Research on Saturday echoed the Department of Health (DOH) in saying that a one-week lockdown would not be enough to bring down the Covid-19 cases.
This, as the DOH logged 12,576 new cases, bringing the total number of infections in the country to 784,043.
Stressing that neither the reproduction number (R0) nor hospital utilization is going down “significantly,” Professor Ranjit Rye said they are calling for an extension of the ECQ for another week in Metro Manila and the Greater Metro Manila area which covers Bulacan, Rizal, Laguna and Cavite.
In a press briefing, the group showed that as of April 2, the R0 in the National Capital Region is 1.58 since the ECQ was implemented.
Covid cases
As of 4 p.m. on April 3, the DOH also recorded 599 recoveries and 103 deaths.
Of the total number of cases, 21.1 percent (165,715) are active cases, 77.2 percent (604,905) have recovered, and 1.71 percent (13,423) have died.
The DOH clarified that the high number of deaths recorded stems from the ongoing data reconciliation process with both the Philippine Statistics Authority and the local Epidemiology Surveillance Units.
“Rest assured that in the interest of accurate data, the Department of Health is exerting all efforts to validate deaths as they are reported,” the DOH said.
Seven laboratories were not able to submit their data to the Covid-19 Document Repository System (CDRS) on April 2, 2021.
The DOH and the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) have also assured the public that they will continuously work to ensure that the same incident on Friday will be avoided. On April 2, the 3,709 earlier reported cases were added to the additional cases reported on April 2, bloating the April 2 tally to over 15,000. The 3,709 cases were submitted by laboratories to the CDRS on March 30 but were rejected due to the high number of records being uploaded in the system—over the past week.
“The average number of records being uploaded into the system was 9,000 per day. This rejection, in turn, resulted in a lower number of reported additional cases for March 31 — 6,128 cases,” the DOH explained.
Image credits: AP/Aaron Favila