The Department of Health (DOH) said there have been increases in coronavirus disease (COVID-19) infections all over the country as the daily case count in the Philippines continues to rise.
"Unlike the spike of cases we saw in April 2021, which is more focused on NCR Plus centered, the increase that we are now seeing is actually more widespread. It covers Luzon, selected areas in Visayas and Mindano, thus, it's really stretching," Dr. Alethea De Guzman, Director of the DOH Epidemiology Bureau, said in a virtual forum on Monday, August 23.
While all areas are now showing increases in COVID-19 cases, areas in Luzon are showing a steep increase while rise in cases in Visayas and Mindanao are much slower, she noted.
De Guzman said that there are currently 110 or 91 percent of provinces, highly urbanized cities, and independent component cities that are under Alert 3 and 4 due to the high number of COVID-19 cases and hospital utilization rate.
The lowest active cases can be observed if the vaccination, interval between case detection and isolation, as well as the increase compliance to the minimum public health standards will be improved, according to the projections done by modeling team FASSSTER and the DOH.
"We observed that during this ECQ , the mobility was actually even higher than the previous, and even higher than the December mobility," De Guzman said.
She added that this was mainly due to the number of essential services that the government had to allow such as the continuation of the vaccination services.
Wide-scale community quarantines are only meant to buy time to upscale health systems and capacities, she pointed out.
De Guzman also clarified that children were not found to contribute more than they previously have in the surge of cases.
"While there were both increases in cases and deaths, this is something that we actually observed across all age groups. There's a trend reversal --children getting more sick versus adults and the elderly--- we do not actually see that in our data," she said.
De Guzman also noted that the percent of the Delta variant detected increased from six percent in June to 42 percent.
Meanwhile, sixty percent of the samples from the returning overseas Filipinos are positive for variants of concerns including alpha, beta and delta, she added.
"When it comes to Overseas Filipino workers, we cannot let our guards down on borders control... Napakahalaga po ang pagbabantay ng ating border protocols (It is very important to monitor our border protocols)," De Guzman said.
As of Sunday, August 22, the country recorded 16,004 new COVID-19 cases. Of which, 13,952 have already recovered, while 215 have died.