DAVAO CITY – The City of Davao may be placed under the alert level 3 status starting January 16 when the cases of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) will continue to increase, an official of the Davao City COVID-19 Task Force said on Wednesday, Jan. 12.
Dr. Michelle Schlosser, spokesperson for the task force, told Davao City Disaster Radio (DCDR 87.5) on Wednesday that the city may revert to a stricter alert level status depending on the number of new daily cases of COVID-19.
The city has been seeing a gradual increase in the number of new infections at the start of the year but authorities expected the surge will take place by either the third or fourth week of this month.
Schlosser said the positivity rate of the city has grown to 8%, which is way above the 5% threshold considered as acceptable by the World Health Organization.
“There is a possibility that it may happen, but it will depend on how many cases we are going to have in the next few days to come,” she said.
She added that it is the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-MEID) that evaluates the alert level status of the local government units.
She said the city government will just adopt the alert level classification as recommended by the IATF-MEID.
Except for LGUs that have already been placed under alert level 3 due to increasing new infections caused by the new variants, the rest of the country remains under alert level 2.
Schlosser said the city still has no reported case of Omicron variant and that it is “battling Delta at the moment.”
He said the DOH-Davao submitted 4,000 specimens for whole genome sequencing last December 30 to detect other variants of COVID-19.
She said the result is expected to come out by the end in three to four weeks.
“The whole genome sequencing takes time. Even without the result of whole genome sequencing, we are already anticipating that we will be battling Omicron soon... Based on studies, Omicron is 10x more transmissible. If you are scared of the high transmissibility of Delta, expect 10x more of it,” she said.