July surge? DOH says gov’t must ramp up measures to prevent it

The Department of Health on Wednesday said the government must always be on guard as another surge in COVID-19 cases in the Philippines remain a possibility.

This was Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire’s statement after National Task Force Against COVID-19 and vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. on Tuesday warned of another surge in June or July.

“We have to qualify the statement of Secretary Galvez. He was just trying to say that there might be this possibility of another surge in the coming months if we are not going to continuously comply with the protocols and if we are not going to be able to contain the spread of this virus,” Vergeire said in an interview with CNN Philippines.

With this, the DOH official said the government must prepare for another surge in a couple of months or even towards the end of the year.

“We don’t know (when is the next surge) because nothing is certain right now. What we really need to do is to ramp up our efforts so that these surges will not happen again,” Vergeire said.

On the other hand, Vergeire explained that the decline in the number of COVID-19 cases reported on Tuesday was just an “artificial decrease” due to closed testing laboratories during the weekend.

“So yesterday’s numbers at around 8,000 plus was an artificial decrease because during the weekend our laboratories, most of them, some of them are non-operational,” she said, adding there are 36 laboratories that were closed over the weekend.

“This is just artificial. It is not true that the cases are declining,” she added.

She reiterated that the effect of the two-week enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) in the National Capital Region Plus bubble may be seen two weeks after its implementation.

“If we try to analyze it the way the incubation period of this virus is, we have 14 days for its incubation period. So we started off with our ECQ about two weeks or less than two weeks, we will see the effect of this ECQ about 10 to 14 days from now,” she said.

The DOH official expressed hope that the numbers will decline next week following the government’s decision to reimpose strict lockdown in Metro Manila and its adjacent provinces.

On Tuesday, the DOH reported 8,571 new cases of COVID-19 bringing the total number of infections to 884,783.—AOL, GMA News