Philippines possibly has 2k cases of Delta variant —OCTA

The Philippines could have as much as 2,000 infections of the highly contagious Delta variant amid the low ability of genome sequencing, OCTA Research Team expert Dr. Guido David said on Tuesday.

David stressed they based their projection on the current genome sequencing abilities of the country, which only account for 100 samples per day out of 8,000 COVID-19 cases. This means this is only less than 2% of the country's total number of virus infections.

"So what we are really showing is the percentage of Delta variants in the samples but if this percentage was applied in the entire number of cases this is what we would see," David said in an online forum hosted by the Federation Of Filipino Chinese Chambers Of Commerce & Industry, Inc.

"As of the latest data, we see 26% of cases sampled were the Delta variant and if that were the case that could be as much as 2,000 cases of Delta variant in the whole Philippines," he added.

"This is just a projection based on the sampling. There is a fairly wide range of  sampling error here but this is what is possible," he further pointed out.

Due to its high infection rate, the Delta variant could also become a "strong replacement factor" for other variants.

"The relevance here is that Delta variant has strong replacement factor, meaning it tends to replace other variants because it is more infectious, 50% more infectious compared to the previous variants," said David.

Philippines so far registered 1,856 Alpha cases, 2,146 Beta cases and 216 Delta cases.

Earlier, the health department said it is seeing that the highly contagious Delta variant could be contributing to the surge of COVID-19 cases.—LDF,GMA News