THE reproduction rate of the virus that causes COVID-19 is down by almost half in the National Capital Region following a two-week lockdown imposed in the “NCR Plus” bubble, the independent OCTA Research Team said yesterday.
Metro Manila now has a 1.01 R naught from 1.9 prior to the implementation of the enhanced community quarantine in Metro Manila and the provinces of Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna and Rizal from March 29 to April 11.
In a television interview, OCTA Research fellow Dr. Guido David said: “The reproduction number as of (April 20) is 1.01. So, it is now essentially at 1. We had a two-week negative growth rate in NCR based on our weekly tracking. Two weeks ago, it was 5,000 plus cases.
Now, we’re averaging 4,300.”
Guido attributed the decrease to the momentum created during the imposition of the ECQ, and said that “if the momentum or direction does not change, I think we can confidently that we have sustained our gains.”
The Department of Health (DOH), however, warned against immediately seeing the drop in daily cases as a result of the ECQ.
“For the past two weeks, you can really see a decline in cases. However, we must be careful in interpreting the data because we still have this artificial decline in cases. We cannot say yet that it is conclusive,” Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said in a virtual briefing.
“We believe the decline is still artificial. Let’s wait for more days. Maybe next week, we can already see the effects of the ECQ and MECQ,” she added.
She cited as an example the numbers last Tuesday, where only over 7,000 new cases were reported.
“There were a number of laboratories that were non- operational last Sunday. There were also several non-reporting labs. Their average output per day, we computed to see if this has affected our numbers, and it has affected. Thus, the decline has been artificial,” she added.
Guido agreed that it was still premature to say that the NCR Plus area can already shift to a lower level of community restriction.
“I think we have to give it a little more time. Maybe by the end of April will be sufficient.
We will know by then the full effect of the MECQ,” Guido said, adding: “We must always balance economy and public health.”
MORE RECOVERIES
At the same time, Vergeire said a change in the DOH’s system of reporting the daily case bulletin will see higher records of recoveries beginning this week.
Vergeire said the department has decided to make the “time-based” recovery system daily, instead of weekly or every Sunday.
“So that we can have more accurate daily numbers, we need to make the time-based tagging daily. This is the reason we have been seeing higher recoveries since last Monday,” said the official.
“And because we have higher cases, most of which are mild and asymptomatic, we can also expect high number of recoveries,” added Vergeire.
The DOH last year introduced “Oplan Recovery,” which is a program that monitors the status of confirmed COVID-19 cases with mild symptoms and are asymptomatic. The scheme uses the time-based recovery system, wherein those who have completed the 14-day isolation period and are cleared via a clinical assessment by a physician are tagged as having recovered despite not undergoing repeat RT-PCR testing.
