DAVAO CITY — Davao City’s coronavirus disease (COVID-19) positivity rate jumped to 1.6% as of January 2 from an average of 0.5% reported in the previous weeks, a local health official said.
Dr. Michelle Schlosser, spokesperson for Davao City COVID-19 Task Force, told Davao City Disaster Radio (DCDR 87.5) on Wednesday that the city, which reported a high vaccination rate, started seeing a significant increase in the number of new COVID-19 infections at the start of the 2022.
She said despite the increase, the positivity rate remains below the acceptable rate of 5%.
She said daily new cases doubled to 32 on Tuesday from 16 on Monday based on the report released by the Department of Health (DOH)-Davao. Total cases were reported at 53,962 with 76 active, 52,095 active, and 1,791 dead.
“Unfortunately, for the past two days, our digits have doubled. We are expecting our cases to go up,” she said.
Schlosser said it could not be conclusively determined if the rising cases are driven by the highly infectious Omicron since no case of such variant has been detected in the city so far.
She said no case of Omicron variant has been detected in the city.
More transmissible than Delta, the Omicron variant is expected to cause exponential rise in COVID-19 cases, according to Schlosser.
Schlosser said that local authorities would try to mitigate the risk of a “massive surge” to avoid collapse of the healthcare system here.
She said the surge of new cases is expected to start by the third or fourth week this month as a consequence of the various social gatherings over the recent holidays.
“It’s very important that we get it now that we are anticipating a surge and we are also anticipating the coming of the Omicron variant. These are studies that show vaccines work against Omicron,” she added.