All-time high: Philippines logs 17,231 new infections

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines yesterday registered a new all-time high daily tally for new coronavirus infections at 17,231, data from the Department of Health (DOH) showed.

Based on the DOH Case Bulletin, the 17,231 cases surpassed the previous peak of 15,310 documented last April 2. Since Aug. 11, the country’s daily tally for COVID-19 has not gone below 10,000 cases.

The health department attributed the increase to a combination of factors, such as breaches in the minimum public health standards and Prevent-Detect-Isolate-Treat-Reintegrate-Vaccinate (PDITR-V) strategies.

It may also have been “aggravated by the presence of variants,” the DOH said.

This ranked the Philippines at 19th place among countries with the highest cases, according to the COVID-19 Dashboard of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Friday’s tally brought to 1,807,800 the total number of COVID-19 cases recorded in the country. Of the total cases, 123,251 or 6.8 percent are active. The positivity rate among those tested is 26.1 percent.

The bulletin showed that 5,595 patients have recovered, bringing the recoveries to 1,653,351. Meanwhile, fatalities rose to 31,198 after 317 patients succumbed to COVID-19.

The DOH said two COVID testing laboratories failed to submit reports through the COVID-19 Document Repository System (CDRS).

No spike

DOH Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire maintained there is no spike in cases among pregnant women, after 30 mothers at the Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital in Manila tested positive for COVID-19.

“As we are observing an increasing trend in the overall COVID-19 cases in the country, there will also be increases across different populations, including pregnant women,” Vergeire said.

Meanwhile, Interior Secretary Eduardo Año ordered local government units (LGUs) to reactivate their respective ‘coordinate operations to defeat epidemic’ or CODE teams to detect and isolate COVID-19 cases in the community.

“We have to act decisively and scale up our efforts to contain the virus,” Año said in an Aug. 18 memo, urging LGUs to implement the government’s PDITR-V strategy.

Global COVID ranking

In the Johns Hopkins tally, the country took the 19th slot after posting a total of 1,791,003 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 30,881 deaths last Aug. 19.

Other Asian countries in the Top 20 are Indonesia (3,930,300 cases) at 5th place, Thailand (989,859) at 10th place, Malaysia (1,489,460) in 12th place and Japan (1,232,532) in 14th place. Vietnam (312,611) was in 21st.

Overall, the United States ranked the highest with 37,293,969 cases, followed by India (32,322,258), Brazil (20,494,212) and Iran (4,587,683).

The Dashboard of the Maryland-based school showed that globally, there were 209,934,849 COVID-19 cases, including 4,402,002 fatalities.

Meanwhile, Sen. Nancy Binay yesterday urged the Inter-Agency Task Force on the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) to conduct more RT-PCR tests in zones where community cases are high.

The senator mentioned that LGUs like Navotas City have come up with policies and strategies that would enable them to test as many individuals as possible, for free, in order to limit community infection.

“The goal is to test more, not to test all. What we need is a rationalized, more targeted cluster approach to suppress the spread of the virus at the community level – not a shotgun approach,” she added.  –  With Emmanuel Tupas, Paolo Romero