Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire (Screengrab from RTVM)
MANILA – The peak of Covid-19 infections during the second week of August can now be compared to the highest number of cases recorded in April this year, an official of the Department of Health (DOH) said Monday.
In a televised Palace briefing, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said the country’s epidemic curve shows increase in cases every week.
“On a national level, sumailalim na rin po sa pagtaas ng kaso noong nakaraang linggo. Ang mga kaso po nung (there has been an increase in cases in the past week. The cases from) August 10 to 16, we already have 12, 824 cases per day,” Vergeire said.
The figure is equivalent to an increase of 3,894 or 45 percent cases per day compared to the previous week from August 3 to 9 with only 8,930 cases.
“Looking at the average cases and percentage change between June to August 12 per age group. We can see an increase of cases in all age groups and increase among 0 to 9 years old increased by 60 percent in July and 74 percent in August,” Vergeire said.
She added there was no major change in the percent contribution of each age group to total cases and cases belonging to 20 to 59 years old remains to have the largest proportion of cases.
From June to August, cases belonging to the 0 to 39 age group increased by 1 percentage point while cases belonging to 50 to 79 age group decreased by 1 percentage point.
For the same period, deaths per day among 0 to 19 years old remained at less than one death per day – the smallest among all age groups.
“Deaths from June to August decreased but we noted that it increased from 0.47 to 0.52 per day for the 0 to 9 years old,” Vergeire said.
As of August 12, the 60 years old and above age group remains to have the highest proportion of deaths while deaths in pediatric age group remained at 0 to 1 percent of the total deaths.
Meantime, age groups 30 to 39 years old and 40 to 49 years old show an increasing trend by 3 to 4 percentage points.
On Tuesday, the DOH reported 10,035 new confirmed cases and 96 new deaths, bring the overall tally of active cases to 105,787 and the death toll to 30,462, respectively.
An additional 10,858 patients have beaten the Covid-19, pushing the country’s overall recovery count to 1,629,462, the DOH added. (PNA)
