San Juan COVID cases slowing down

MANILA, Philippines  — The doubling rate for the transmission of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases in San Juan is now taking 12 days, according to Mayor Francis Zamora.

Zamora said from a 7.6 doubling time rate last month, health officials found that COVID-19 cases took 12.87 days to double as of yesterday.

“This is a big improvement because a month ago, it was 7.6 days. Now we have one of the slowest rates in Metro Manila,” he said.

Aside from health and quarantine protocols enforced in the city, Zamora said the local government’s mass testing capacity helped prevent the transmission of the virus.

San Juan has procured polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machines to test suspected COVID-19 cases, persons with symptoms of the virus, volunteers as well as medical and government frontliners at risk of contracting the disease.

“These people are qualified for free PCR testing. We never used rapid test kits because compared to the PCR’s accuracy of 95 to 98 percent, they only had 30 percent accuracy,” Zamora explained.

The city has been conducting up to 7,000 PCR tests.

According to the local government, only 1.17 percent of the total number of tests yielded positive results.

The city has been conducting house-to-house distribution of relief goods, which prevented long lines in the barangays.

The smallest and one of the most densely-populated cities in Metro Manila, San Juan emerged as one of the first virus epicenters after a number of COVID019 cases were traced back to Greenhills Shopping Center in March.

Data showed that the COVID-19 infections were concentrated in three areas in the city: Barangay Greenhills, where the shopping complex is located, the neighboring Barangay West Crame, which is the most populated village in the city and Barangay Jose Corazon de Jesus.

As of June 24, San Juan City logged 80 active cases of COVID-19 and 212 recoveries. The number of deaths stood at 44 since June 3.