DAYS after new quarantine restrictions were announced by Malacañang, the Department of Health yesterday there is an an increase in COVID-19 cases in “half of the provinces and cities.”
Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said there has also been an increase in deaths from COVID-19 but did not say which areas are showing the increasing fatalities.
“Half of the provinces and cities are showing growth in cases as well as healthcare utilization rate,” Vergeire said in a briefing.
On the increasing deaths, she said, “This can be seen in certain regions of the country, where we are seeing growth in number of deaths.”
No figures as to cases and deaths per region, province, or city were released by the DOH as of press time.
Vergeire said the increasing number of infections and deaths, and the presence of the highly transmissible Delta variant, are the reasons the national government decided to implement stricter community quarantine restrictions.
“Transmission increases as more people go out and stay together. We have been getting several reports of violations of our health protocols,” she said.
“We don’t want to do this (lockdown) but we need to limit mobility of the people to only essential ones so that we can prevent further transmission of the virus,” she added.
The country has confirmed 216 Delta variant cases. The DOH reported that the number of active cases has gone up to 17 while deaths climbed to nine.
“As to the outcomes for the 216 Delta cases, we have 190 recoveries, nine deaths, and 17 active,” Vergeire said.
This is higher compared to the last information from the DOH, wherein there were 192 recoveries, eight deaths, and 16 active cases.
“We are continuously doing revalidation of our data with the LGUs,” she said.
Of the 216 Delta variant cases, 165 are tagged as local cases, 48 are returning overseas Filipinos (ROF), while three are still being verified if they are local or ROF cases.
Vergeire rejected the claim of the independent OCTA Research Team that there is already a community transmission of the Delta variant in the National Capital Region (NCR).
“For now, we don’t have evidence yet showing that there is no more linkages among cases in this area even though our genome sequencing has detected these 200 plus Delta variant cases,” she said.
“We need sufficient evidence for us to declare that there is already community transmission because there are international implications to this and we also have international definitions that we align to,” said Vergeire.
On Sunday, the OCTA Research Team said evidence points to Metro Manila now seeing a community transmission of the Delta variant. However, it said it is the DOH that can officially confirm the occurrence of community transmission.
But Vergeire said the government “should assume that there is already this kind of transmission so we can better manage the response and ramp up our efforts.”
On the increasing number of COVID infections, Vergeire said the DOH, in response, is continuously enhancing the healthcare capacity of hospitals.
In Metro Manila, she said, the DOH added 240 ICU beds in different hospitals, while 755 isolation and 332 ICU beds have been added in Luzon.
In the Visayas, 314 isolation and 210 ICU beds were added, and 190 isolation and 306 ICU beds in Mindanao.
“We were already able to increase our healthcare capacity by this much since March and April,” she said Vergeire.
Vergeire said the DOH has also increased the number of prepositioned medicines, oxygen supply, and other logistics in different health facilities.
