Covid-19 cases seen to plateau

CITY HALL BEAT

Aileen P. Refuerzo

BAGUIO CITY -- The surge in cases here had shown signs of letting up raising hopes for a plateau and eventually a downtrend in the case turnout.
    Mayor Benjamin Magalong on Jan. 25 said the city’s numbers based on the various metrics have begun to decrease indicating the start of the plateau stage where cases neither go up or down en route to the downtrend stage.
    “But this is if we do not experience saddling or sudden rebound in cases,” the mayor qualified.
    The mayor said the plateau may have had started last week and conservative projections placed it to last until this week en route to a downtrend by the second week of February.
    “Downtrend is a possibility next week given the usual plateau duration of only 7 to 10 days but we want to be conservative in our projections,” he said.
    City Health Officer Dr. Rowena Galpo said the city had a 637 daily case average from Jan. 16-22 while recoveries were 419 per day.
    Death average jumped from 1 to 3 per day.
    The case positivity rate slightly decreased to 43.58 percent on week Jan. 26-22 from  44.10 percent in week Jan. 9-15.
    The weekly infection growth rate also went down but remained above the threshold of 1 which meant that there is still an active case transmission in the city.
    The average daily attack rate (ADAR) climbed to 98.1 from 61.3 and the two-week growth rate decreased to 187 percent from1,305 percent.
    Hospital care utilization rate went down to 68.7 percent from 71.47 percent while isolation facility bed occupancy was at 69.95 percent from 71.35 percent as of Jan. 24.
    The city’s epidemic risk level remained at critical risk also as of Jan. 24.
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Throughout the pandemic, the city government here has ensured its testing capacity remained high to capture the real coronavirus disease situation and act proactively.
    "We do not cheat to make it appear that we have low cases.  We are consistently testing and targeting the vulnerable sectors," Magalong said.
    The mayor said the number of tests done has a direct correlation to the number of positive cases because testing is a way to find who has the virus especially since there are asymptomatic cases.
    “If you do a lot of tests, the number of cases will increase.  Kaya yung iba dinadaya na.  To lower their cases, they lower their tests," he said.
    "But us here, hindi natin dinadaya.  Consistent tayo sa testing.  Mataas ang kaso natin pero okay lang kasi malaki ang nacacapture natin na mga positive cases at agad nating naa-isolate para di na makapanghawa pa,” he said.
    Testing was further ramped up with the city combining RT-PCR tests with antigen tests to identify more infected individuals for early intervention.
    Its latest daily testing average was 1,015.
    The mayor earlier said the omicron variant had begun circulating in the city before Dec. 14 last year based on the history of one of the two Baguio patients detected with omicron variant by the Philippine Genome Center.
    “The omicron patient’s specimen was collected on Dec. 14 and was found positive on Dec. 15 so this means the virus has been here before Dec. 14.  That means we already had community transmission before Christmas,” the mayor said in an interview with the media Jan. 17.
    “This explains why our cases shot up towards the end of December where our case reproduction number suddenly increased and after New Year, we saw how our cases skyrocketed because we had an extensive community transmission during that period,” the mayor said.
    Based on the PGC’s bio-surveillance report dated Jan. 15, omicron variant was detected in two Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) patients in the city confirming the mayor's earlier pronouncements on the presence of the variant in the city which he based on the trend in cases, pattern of illness and symptoms of patients and other indicators.
    The patients, both female aged 19 and 27 had already recovered, as per record of the city's lead contact tracing team.
    The Dept. of Health Cordillera said one patients was a close contact of a previous case, was asymptomatic and without travel history outside the city 14 days before undergoing testing.  Her specimen was submitted for whole genome sequencing by the PGC on Dec. 23 and came out positive for omicron on Jan. 15.
    The other patient had symptoms and also had no travel history outside the city before undergoing testing on Dec. 22 and turned positive on Dec. 24.  Sample was submitted for genome testing on Dec. 28  and detected positive for omicron also on Jan. 15.