DAVAO CITY—This city has breached the 1,000 mark of residents infected by the Covid-19 that has been going on for one week already amid medical experts’ warning that the surge may likely last up to the middle of March.
“We are now on the second week of a surge and we are not yet on the peak,” Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio said on her regular Monday radio program.
Infections reaching the1,000 mark were first recorded on January 19, with 1,197 cases on a 39.9 percent positivity rate. It hovered above the 1,000 mark every day with the highest recorded number at 1,540 on January 20 and by January 23, the number was still above the mark at 1,395 cases, and with 50 percent positivity rate.
In the previous critical surge in September last year, the number of cases in the city was in the average of less than 500, with two days reaching 700 and one day of having 617 cases, and with positivity averaging 30 percent.
This week, some 57 of 182 barangays were placed in critical risk category, running from north to south coastal areas and going into the interior beyond the población areas.
Duterte-Carpio said physicians under the Covid-19 cluster told her that the level of active cases would likely climb up further to the level of 14,000. As of January 23, the active cases in the city were more than 8,000, part of the 10,877 active cases for the entire Davao region. “That means we are not yet in the peak,” she said, quoting medical experts as saying.
As of January 23, some 889 beds remained available from the 2,606 total beds in quarantine and isolation facilities. Many of the Covid-19 patients were allowed to be in house isolation for as long the residences qualified in the Department of Health’s minimum quality benchmark for home quarantine. The mayor said 822 of houses have been locked down. One building was also placed on lockdown as with one compound. Some 1,112 personnel were also assigned to monitor these locked down houses and building.
She said the city continued to rely on the memory of patients, including their honesty, on identifying possible close contacts. However, the capacity to test was also hampered by the supply of test kits, she added.
The mayor said there was also a problem with the Safe Davao QR, which has cases of unrecorded items to where the QR holder had been to.
She said 1,280,467 residents have taken their first dose, a number, which is 98 percent of the target herd immunity of 1.299 million. Of that number, 226,505 have their second dose. Only 154,267 have taken their booster shots.