OCTA fellow: No ‘significant threat’ being monitored in NCR’s COVID situation

The COVID-19 situation in the National Capital Region is already "close to plateauing," Dr. Guido David of the independent OCTA Research firm said Tuesday.

During a House committee on trade and industry briefing, David said OCTA Research presently does not see any significant threat to the COVID-19 situation in the metro.

"We actually recommended the move to Alert Level 2 so we're just talking about risk and we are already at the level where we were last year, around 2,000 cases per day. We're not seeing a significant threat right now," David said.

"We may see upticks due to mobility but as we can see, we're already at a... close to a plateauing as mentioned by Usec. De Guzman earlier," he added.

In a separate message to GMA News Online, David clarified that this is not definite yet and it could be determined in a week if the COVID-19 situation in NCR is indeed plateauing.

He also mentioned that the entire Philippines is on a downward trend when it comes to COVID-19 cases.

David said that OCTA Research is also looking at the Delta AY 4.2 variant, wit currently 94% of the cases being in the United Kingdom. He said the national government might want to focus its attention on the travelers from the UK.

In October, the Department of Health said experts are still studying the potential impact of the Delta sublineage on the transmissibility and severity of COVID-19.

So far, it has not been detected yet in the Philippines.

The DOH on Monday recorded 1,547 fresh COVID-19 infections, bringing the country's total number of cases to 2,818,511.

The new cases increased the active cases to 27,025. — BM, GMA News