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Metro Manila hospitals to reach full capacity by April if gov't fails to act on COVID-19 surge -- OCTA
Metro Manila hospitals to reach full capacity by April if gov't fails to act on COVID-19 surge -- OCTA
Hospitals in the National Capital Region (NCR) are projected to reach their full capacity by April if no “drastic” action will be made to curb the rising cases of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), an independent research group.
In its latest report dated March 20, the OCTA Research Group said the country’s reproduction number currently dangles at around 1.9, which means that one COVID-19 positive individual may infect up to two people.
“ur modeling suggests that with the current reproduction number hovering around 1.9, we expect both total bed and ICU capacity in the NCR to reach full 100 percent occupancy by the first week of April,” OCTA said.
“Reducing the reproduction number to 1.5 delays this critical threshold by about one to two weeks to the middle of the month," the group added.
According to the researchers, their projections suggest that the surge of COVID-19 cases in the metropolis is at a “critical juncture.”
“Unless the national government and our LGUs take drastic and immediate action to significantly reduce the reproduction number of the surge in Metro Manila, we should expect our hospital facilities and medical frontliners to be overwhelmed within a period of several weeks, just around and after Easter,” the group said.
On March 20, the Philippines reported another record-breaking number of new COVID-19 cases with 7,999 new infections, which brought the nationwide tally of confirmed cases to 656,056.
OCTA explained that the parameters used in the model were “conservative in nature” as it did not take into account the B.1.1.7 and the B.1.351 variants of coronavirus.
“We wanted to present the best case scenario,” researchers said.
For their projections, the researchers “assumed” that patients were hospitalized seven days on average after onset of symptoms.
They also “assumed” that patients who die spend around 10 days in the hospital, while patients who survive are confined for 27 days.
The experts estimated that the hospitalization rate and mortality rate of hospitalized patients in NCR are 11 percent and 18 percent, respectively.
“Finally, we assumed a total bed capacity of 8,500 beds, of which 750 were ICU beds,” OCTA said in its report.
“Once again, these estimates actually exceed current bed capacities in the NCR, which were 8,300 total beds and 738 ICU beds on March 17, 2021, to provide a best case scenario for the current surge,” it added.