The number of daily coronavirus disease (COVID-19) infections may increase once the country reopens the economy but it is not expected to overwhelm the healthcare capacity, especially in Metro Manila, an OCTA Research fellow said on Thursday, Feb. 24.
“There is a concern that the daily COVID-19 cases may increase but it should stabilize depending on the level of hybrid immunity and then drop. This is what we saw in other countries and so there is no reason to believe that we are not the same,” said OCTA fellow and molecular biologist Fr. Nicanor Austriaco during the Go Negosyo’s “Exploring a Safe Exit” virtual discussion.
Citing the recent COVID-19 experiments held in February, Austriaco said that no resurgence of cases occurred after the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Norway removed all their COVID-19 restrictions.
This, according to Austriaco, was because of the significant population protection from hybrid immunity.
Hybrid immunity is the immunity acquired from vaccination and natural COVID-19 infection.
“We do not expect the increase to overwhelm our healthcare capacity, especially the National Capital Region (NCR). If millions of our kababayans got sick with Omicron in January and our healthcare infrastructure was able to sustain that, it is unlikely that at this point, after everyone has already gotten sick, that we will have a similar kind of surge from Omicron or that we will overwhelm our hospitals,” Austriaco added.
Meanwhile, Austriaco stressed that there will always be community transmission of COVID-19 and that some Filipinos may experience trauma from the pandemic.
“There will be different thresholds for risks and exposure as we reopen our society. There will always be community transmission of COVID-19, there are people who are imagining that at some point there will be no more COVID-19, unfortunately, this is unlikely and we are going to live with COVID-19,” he added.