An infectious disease expert said on Sunday that he favors delaying the further easing of COVID-19 restrictions in the country, joining the chorus of calls from the Department of Health and other doctors amid the looming threat of the highly contagious Omicron variant.
Dr. Rontgene Solante, head of San Lazaro Hospital's Adult Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine Department, said he prefers an extension of the COVID-19 Alert Level 2 imposition — scheduled to end on Wednesday, Dec. 15, in most parts of the country—until the end of the month.
"Personally, I really would agree if the government will still extend the Alert Level 2 until the end of December because what we need now is really making people assured that we don't have a case of the Omicron variant,” Solante said in an interview with ABS-CBN's TeleRadyo.
Before the confirmation by the World Health Organization of the Omicron as a new COVID-19 variant of concern late last month, some sectors and officials pushed to downgrade by December the alert to Level 1, particularly in Metro Manila, following weeks of declining new cases.
But with the detection and spread of the new variant in several countries, retaining Metro Manila under Alert Level 2 is the "most prudent" option, said Presidential Adviser for Entrepreneurship Joey Concepcion.
Health Secretary Francisco Duque III also prefers that the Philippines remain under Alert Level 2 as mobility is expected to increase during the holidays and as the omicron variant threatens the country’s reopening.
“Our mobility will increase during the holidays, we know that. And there’s the looming threat of the Omicron variant. So it's better that we are conservative,” Duque said previously.
Public health advocate Dr. Anthony Leachon added: “I think it would be best that we think about this and perhaps suspend our decision to shift to the looser quarantine from Alert Level Two to Alert Level One, given the vaccination challenges that we have right now as well as the threat of the omicron variant entering the country through our borders.”
Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. also said the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) is reconsidering plans to downgrade the capital region’s status following recent developments.
The National Capital Region is home to around 13.5 million people and accounts for a third of the national gross domestic product.
“Our advocacy is it's still better to be vaccinated rather than not be vaccinated because you still have antibodies for protection,” Solante said.
Meanwhile, the Philippine Genome Center (PGC) on Sunday said none of the samples sequenced from November and December from travelers showed the more transmissible Omicron variant of COVID-19.
“Last week, we sequenced about 574 and all those are the Delta variant. We have also conducted an emergency run from samples obtained in the airport, and all those are also Delta except for one with B.1.1.203 variant,” PGC Executive Director Dr. Cynthia Saloma said in an interview on radio dzBB.
B.1.1.203, Saloma added, is not a variant of concern.
The Department of Health (DOH) said on Saturday that none of the over 250 travelers from South Africa, who arrived in the country from Nov. 15 to 29, tested positive for the Omicron variant.
They noted that the traveler detected with the B.1.1.203 COVID-19 variant arrived in the Philippines on Nov. 16 and the test result came in on Nov. 21.
Saloma added that PGC’s sequencing does not only come from airports but also in regions that have clusters of infections which, according to her, are mostly of the Delta variant.
On Aug. 16, Saloma said the more transmissible Delta variant has overtaken the other variants detected in the Philippines and is now considered as the dominant variant in the country.
However, she said it is not safe to say that other variants evolving after the Delta variant are less severe without enough clinical data.
“This is why we need to study them carefully. With this, we have discovered Omicron that has so many mutations in the spike regions.
This is what we call the most evolved SARS-CoV-2 virus today as it has about 50 mutations,” she said.
Saloma also said the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) approved the funding of the genome sequencing equipment for the new genome centers that will be established in the Visayas and Mindanao.
She said that PGC also hired additional people in these new genome centers, with 10 people in each laboratory. These new hires are graduates from programs such as molecular biology and bio-information.
The Philippines logged 402 new COVID-19 cases on Sunday, raising the total caseload to 2,836,592.
The death toll rose to 50,280 with the addition of 184 new fatalities.
The DOH also said total recoveries climbed to 2,775,057 after 509 more patients recovered from the respiratory illness.
The new infections brought the country's active case count to 11,255, of which 4,334 are mild, 876 are asymptomatic, 1,961 are severe, and 401 are in critical condition.
The positivity rate was 1.2 percent based on 36,799 tested individuals conducted on Dec. 10.
The DOH also noted that of the 402 cases reported, 380 or 95 percent occurred within the last 14 days.
The DOH said 23 percent of the country’s intensive care unit (ICU) beds, 23 percent of isolation beds, 13 percent of ward beds, and 13 percent of the mechanical ventilators, were in use.
In Metro Manila, 26 percent of the ICU beds, 19 percent of isolation beds, 18 percent of ward beds, and 17 percent of the ventilators, were in use.
