The Philippines is nearing its transition from a pandemic to an endemic state of the coronavirus disease, a health expert said Wednesday.
Dr. Rontgene Solante, head of adult infectious diseases and tropical medicine at San Lazaro Hospital, said while the country is not there yet, it can reach the endemic stage if people continue following health protocols and get vaccinated.
Another infectious diseases expert, Dr. Edsel Salvana, earlier said that the country was already seeing signs of reaching an endemic stage due to its improved health care utilization rate and decreasing COVID-19 infections.
Department of Health (DOH) officer-in-charge Maria Rosario Vergeire explained earlier that endemic is “a state wherein cases are stable, already constant, and predictable.” With this, there should be a balance between the level of transmission and immunity, she added.
The country on Tuesday recorded 1,554 new COVID-19 infections, bringing the active tally down to 25,004.
Meanwhile, at least 73.3 million Filipinos are now fully vaccinated against COVID-19, while 20.1 million have received their booster shots.
Solante pointed out that data on the second-generation COVID-19 vaccines targeting the Omicron variant showed that they could produce better antibodies and protection compared to the first generation vaccines.
“If we can maintain the wall of immunity against these variants, there is a chance that the Omicron will not mutate. But again, it is not something definite because the ability of this virus to mutate again, especially the Omicron lineage, is still there,” he said in a mix of English and Filipino.
“We’re hoping to weaken the Omicron lineage, but the prospect of other variants of concern is still there until we can break the transmission,” he said.
Vergeire had said the DOH has been coordinating with vaccine manufacturers Moderna and Pfizer for the country’s procurement of Omicron-specific vaccines.
She also said the government is hoping to buy these new generation COVID-19 vaccines by the first quarter of 2023.
Meanwhile, the independent monitoring group OCTA Research said the seven-day COVID-19 positivity rate in the National Capital Region (NCR) has gone down to 17.3 percent on Oct. 10 from the previous 19 percent on Oct. 3.
The positivity rate refers to the percentage of people who were found positive for COVID-19 among the total number of individuals tested.
David said the NCR’s reproduction number also went down to 0.93 from 0.99 on Oct. 6.
The reproduction rate refers to the number of people who can be infected by one case. A reproduction number below 1 indicates that the transmission of the virus is slowing down.
The NCR’s one-week growth rate was negative 16 percent, while its health care utilization for COVID-19 patients was at 37 percent.
“Let’s hope the downward trend continues the rest of the year,” David said.
In other developments:
• The DOH said it plans to allow the vaccination against COVID-19 of children aged 4 and younger, pending the results of the evaluation of the Philippine Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Vergeire said the emergency use authorization (EUA) of the vaccines for this age group needed to be first approved by the FDA.
• The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) said the software for the country’s digital COVID-19 vaccination certificate VaxCertPH expired in September and that it was resolving budget issues to keep it running. The renewal of the software contract is an “unprogrammed expense” on the part of the DICT because the VaxCertPH was already supposed to be turned over to the Department of Health, DICT Secretary Ivan Uy said. However, he said the DOH only recently said its personnel were not yet ready to manage the system and asked the DICT to continue running it. Filipinos traveling abroad rely on VaxCertPH, which is accepted internationally as a proof of vaccination. Social media users have been pointing out several problems in using VaxCertPH, such as the lack of updated data that includes their booster shots.
