As the number of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases in Metro Manila continues to decline, a fellow of the independent research group OCTA projected that the number of cases in the region will further go down to 2,000 by the end of January and around 500 by the end of February.
"Based on our estimate, the situation will be highly improved even by the end of the month. We're projecting just a little over 2,000 cases per day in the NCR ," OCTA Research Fellow Dr. Guido David said in a GO Negosyo forum on Friday, Jan. 21.
"By Valentine's Day, it could be at less than 1,000 cases. By the end of February, it could be at around 500 cases. Again, these are very rough projections," David added.
He noted that the "decrease of new cases in the NCR is nearly as rapid as the increase during the surge," which is very similar to what had happened in South Africa where the Omicron variant of COVID-19 was first detected.
David recommended that to sustain the rapid decrease, "downgrading to a lower alert level at this time might not be advisable until Metro Manila reaches 'moderate' risk."
The OCTA fellow noted that Metro Manila's overall COVID-19 risk remains at a "critical" level, which means that "we are still not out of the woods."
Metro Manila had 9,455 new COVID-19 cases on Jan. 20, based on the data of the Department of Health.
"We're still seeing a high reproduction number of 1.58, although this has already decreased . The ADAR is still at a critical level and the positivity rate is still very high . The silver lining here is that the healthcare utilization rate is still less than 60 percent," David said.
"The weekly growth rate is now - (negative) 20 percent. This means that the number of cases this week is 20 percent fewer than the number of cases during the previous week," he said.
Meanwhile, David said OCTA continued to observe increasing COVID-19 cases in areas outside of Metro Manila.
"We are seeing an increase in cases and this should not be surprising because the wave has spread out into other parts of the country. Back on Jan. 11, only about less than 4,000 cases were from outside NCR, Region 4A, and Region 3. But as of yesterday, almost 12,000 cases were from outside NCR Plus," he said.
"We could see that although there is a noticeable downward trajectory in the NCR and possibly parts of Region 4A, there is now an upward trajectory in other parts of the country," he added.
David advised the public to remain vigilant in following minimum public health protocols to prevent the further spread of COVID-19 infections.