‘3 percent chance of dying if one gets Covid-19 in Baguio’

By Aileen P. Refuerzo

BAGUIO CITY – This city’s Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) recovery rate has been pegged at 50 percent as of May 4 with the recuperation recently of a nurse patient, the 15th to have hurdled the disease out of the city's 30 confirmed cases.

The fatality rate is at three percent or one death out of the 30 patients.

"This means that when one contracts the virus, she or he has a three percent chance of dying," Dr. Donnabel Panes, head of the City Epidemiology Surveillance Unit of the City Health Services Office told the management committee meeting chaired by Mayor Benjamin Magalog on May 4.

Panes presented the epidemiology of the city's COVID cases done jointly by the CHSO and the University of the Philippines to establish the distribution and determinants of the cases in the city.

As per the report, the patients' distribution as per case classification of the Department of Health is confirmed cases -- 3 percent; suspect cases -- 89 percent; probable -- 8 percent.

The average age is 46 with an age range of 8 days old to 77 years old.

Panes noted most of those infected were of working age or within the age groups of 30-40 and 40-50 years old and that there were more female patients than male.

As to the clinical classifications of the cases, 40 percent had mild symptoms, 37 percent moderate symptoms, 20 percent asymptomatic and 3 percent death.

On the presence of co-morbid conditions, 63 percent of the patients had pre existing conditions and 37 percent had none. Four had diabetes, three had hypertension and nine had other one health problem each.

               Forty three percent of the patients had exposure at a health facility, 37 percent had history of travel in National Capital Region, 10 percent had travel abroad and 10 percent had no travel history.

Mayor Magalong said the data will help guide them in the adoption and fine tuning of the control measures being implemented to combat the disease.