The country on Saturday logged 23,134 new COVID-19 cases, the second highest daily tally since the pandemic started as the Department of Health warned infections in Metro Manila will continue to rise.
National Task Force against COVID-19 spokesman Restituto Padilla said the enforcement of the Alert Level 4 in the National Capital Region could be extended for two more weeks to bring down the daily tally of infections.
“It could be extended for two more weeks before we can see its effect on our data,” Padilla said.
Alert Level 4 with granular
alert…lockdowns – the second highest under the new quarantine system – means case counts are high
or increasing, with COVID-19 beds and intensive care beds at increasing utilization rates.
Saturday's new cases pushed the nationwide tally to 2,347,550 while active cases stood at 184,088.
On Saturday last week, the DOH recorded an all-time high of 26,303 cases.
Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said contrary to the forecast of the independent OCTA Research Group, the department does not yet see that cases in the National Capital Region have already peaked.
“At this point in our analysis, we have not yet observed that the cases have already peaked. We are still studying it,” she said.
“When you say it has already peaked, this is the highest number that you could report. After this, you will see a continuous decline in the number of cases. In one of the dates last week, we tallied almost 8,000 cases in a day in NCR. After that, we saw that the trend is inconsistent with 5,000 to 5,500 cases per day. Recently, we have recorded 5,800. So the numbers are still going up and down,” she added.
Vergeire said the number of COVID-19 cases in Metro Manila has even increased by eight percent in the last seven days.
The DOH earlier said new COVID-19 cases in NCR could range from 16,0000 to 43,000 a day by the end of September.
Vergeire, however, held up the hope that the granular lockdowns being tested in Metro Manila could bring the numbers down.
The country’s intensive care unit beds and ward beds for COVID-19 patients remain at high risk, which means the occupancy rate is more than 70 percent but less than 85 percent.
Around 77 percent of the total 4,400 ICU beds in the country are occupied while 77 percent of the 1,500 beds in NCR are in use.
Meanwhile, Vergeire said the new alert level system in Metro Manila is not meant to relax restrictions but to refocus the government’s COVID-19 response.
Vergeire made the clarification after World Health Organization country representative Rabindra Abeyasinghe advised against relaxing quarantine restrictions as the Philippines is still far from achieving herd immunity.
“I think a lot of people have the wrong impression regarding this pilot implementation. We are not relaxing the protocols. We need to understand that we re-strategized so that our response will be more focused [on the highly-burdened areas through the granular lockdowns],” she said.
The Department of the Interior and Local Government, for its part, reminded local government units to ensure that they have designated at least one contact tracer for every barangay with a population not exceeding 5,000 to boost case finding and contact tracing efforts in Metro Manila.
"We want to be more aggressive in our case finding and contact tracing efforts considering the fast spread of the Delta variant. It is important there are more contract tracers in each barangay to facilitate the tracking and help those positive cases and close contacts,” Interior Secretary Eduardo Año said in a statement.
He said the barangay contact tracer should be in addition to the contract tracers coming from the LGUs.
Año said for barangays with a population of more than 5,000, additional contact tracers may be hired or assigned by the LGUs to ensure that there are people on the ground who are monitoring COVID-19 patients and their close contacts.