The Philippines has been reclassified as “high risk” for Covid-19 following the increase in cases toward the end of 2021, a health official confirmed on Monday.
At a media forum on Monday, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire also said that the average daily cases per day is almost seven times higher or higher by 570 percent from the recent week as compared to the previous week.
“Nationally, we are now at high risk case classification from low-risk case class in the previous week, showing a positive two-week growth rate at 222 percent and a moderate risk average daily attack rate at 1.07 cases for every 100,000 individuals,” Vergeire said.
Vergeire said that an increase in positivity rate was observed in all regions of the country.
Meanwhile, the health systems capacity in the region is under 50 percent utilization.
The country’s health-care utilization rate is at “low risk,” with the total bed utilization at 18 percent and intensive care unit utilization at 22 percent.
Daily ‘scorecard’
ON Monday, the Department of Health (DOH) logged 4,084 additional cases with 497 recoveries and 16 deaths.
The total number of infections in the country is now at 2,855,819.
Of the 4,084 reported cases, 4,057 (99 percent) occurred within the recent 14 days (December 21 to January 3, 2022).
The top regions with cases in the recent two weeks were the National Capital Region (NCR) with 2,831 (or 70 percent), Region 4A (571 or 14 percent) and Region 3 (273 or 7 percent).
Of the 16 deaths, 11 occurred in December 2021 (69 percent), 3 in October 2021 (19 percent), 1 in September 2021 (6 percent), and 1 in August 2021 (6 percent) due to late encoding of death information to COVIDKaya.
Of the total number of infections, 0.9 percent (24,992) are active, 97.3 percent (2,779,241) have recovered, 1.81 percent (51,586) have died.
Two laboratories were not operational on January 1, 2022, while 21 laboratories were not able to submit their data to the Covid-19 Document Repository System.
Based on data in the last 14 days, the 23 labs contribute, on average, 5.1 percent of samples tested and 5.2 percent of positive individuals.