Health officer-in-charge Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said that the Covid-19 situation in the Philippines remains to be “manageable.”
“We are confident to say that our cases are manageable because our hospitals are not having increases in their admissions. Our severe and critical infections are at that stable point,” Vergeire said in a media forum.
The DOH said that nationally, severe/critical admissions are beginning to plateau after a recent slight uptick, while ICU admissions are currently plateauing.
Visayas and Mindanao remain on a plateau while Narional Capital Region, Plus Areas, and rest of Luzon are on a slow downward trend.
Vergeire also cited the high number of vaccinated individuals and observance of minimum public health standards especially the wearing of face masks.
As of January 30, 2023, more than 73.8 million Filipinos have been fully-vaccinated.
More than 6.9 million senior citizens are already inoculated while more than 10 million adolescents are fully-vaccinated and almost 1.2 million are already boosted.
Also, more than 5.4 million children are fully-vaccinated.
More than 21.3 million individuals have received their 1st booster dose and almost 3.9 million have received their 2nd booster shots.
PHEIC
As to the decision of WHO to maintain the declaration of the PHEIC, the DOH official cited some reasons such as the increasing number of Covid deaths globally. These deaths, she said, is averaging from 10,000 to 30,000 per day, as well as the emergence of new variants, and the difficulty of WHO to analyze the current Covid-19 state due to scarcity of reports and data.
However, she said, though that the country abide by the global declaration of public health emergency, “It doesn’t have to be that because the WHO declared globally that there is still a public health emergency, that our status should still be the same.”
“But it doesn’t have to be that we are still under that state where restrictions should be there and the other implications to a public health emergency should be there,” she reiterated.