Granular lockdown in Manila (PNA photo by Avito C. Dalan)
MANILA – The coronavirus spread has not slowed down yet, a health official said Monday, noting that a significant number of laboratories were off during the Holy Week break and individuals did not have themselves tested.
“There are different number of labs that did not operate in the past days. Yesterday, I think, there were 71 laboratories which did not operate and this will really affect the numbers we’re going to report in the coming days,” Department of Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said in an online media forum.
“We are requesting them [the laboratories] please don’t stop your operations at this very critical period of our situation because we need to know the numbers to guide our response,” Vergeire added.
In its latest report, the OCTA Research group noted that the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) was “effective" in slowing the spread of Covid-19 in the National Capital Region because the reproduction number or the number of individuals a Covid-19 case infections in the area decreased to 1.61.
She advised the public not to interpret the “artificial decrease in cases as a slowdown in the transmission” of the virus.
“Hindi pa po natin makikita ang epekto nitong ginagawa nating (We won’t see the effect of the) ECQ until about two weeks we have ended the ECQ. So, we have to be clear on that so that people will continue to be cautious,” she said.
Vergeire noted that the cases in 2020 started to decline only 10 days after the ECQ ended, while the healthcare utilization rate went down after three to four weeks.
On Sunday, the DOH reported 795,051 confirmed cases with 646,100 recoveries and 13,425 deaths. (PNA)
