Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said on Tuesday, Feb. 15 that they will assess the safety seal program being implemented by the government on Thursday and if it is up to par, then the National Capital Region (NCR) may ease to Alert Level 1 by the first week of March.
In an interview on CNN, Duque said that they have to carefully look at the safety seal certification program because if the compliance rate is very low, then the risk is there that the spread may continue and give rise to a much higher number of cases in the weeks to come.
He said that the safety seal program's objective is to ensure that all these establishments will have very minimal or low to no risk for those who will enter those establishments.
Alert Level 1, according to Duque, will be the "new normal" but underscored the very important point that even if NCR will be under Alert Level 1, the following minimum public health standards (MPHS) will remain.
If there is going to be a removal of this practice or policy, it will be done gradually as we usher in the new normal. In fact, the IATF and the National Task Force are already preparing for the new normal National Action Plan 5. So we'll wait for this, we will launch it and we will make it public as soon as it's been approved by the IATF and the President," he said.
Metro Manila is currently under low-risk case classification.In his report during the President's pre-recorded public address, Duque said that the country registered a low-risk two-week growth rate of negative 74 percent and an average daily attack rate of 5.26 per 100,000 population.
The Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) has retained Alert Level 2 status for Metro Manila until the end of February.
Duque mentioned that the Metro Manila Development Council had passed a resolution addressed to IATF to allow them to continue with the current Alert Level 2 status. He explained that this was granted since the council is the one actually in-charge of managing the pandemic response on the ground.
By mid-March DOH said that national daily new cases are expected to go below 2,100 according to the projections made by Feasibility Analysis of Syndromic Surveillance using Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeler (FASSTER).
"However, if compliance to minimum public health standards (MPHS) decreases, cases are expected to go back to an increasing trend. These projections assume that most coses have the Omicron variant and are based on several assumptions including mobility, vaccination coverage, and adherence to MPHS," DOH said