THE April 9 spike in the number of deaths from Covid-19 owed to delayed verification from local government units, the Department of Health (DOH) said on Saturday
Of the 401 recorded fatalities during that period, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said 78 percent or 287 cases happened last March.
The other 45 were from February and only 49 occurred in April.
Vergeire noted that while they can get prompt reports for Covid-19 related fatalities from hospitals, this is not the case for those coming from LGUs.
“There are some delays [of fatality reports] which would be coming from the Disease Reporting Unit of the local government because when they get the data from their deaths it is incomplete–it has no cause of death, date of death,” Vergeire explained.
“This could not be included in the official tally since it lacks details so it must be verified with the local government before it could be returned to us,” she added.
Regional distribution
The number of Covid-related deaths last Friday was the biggest recorded in a day.
Around 46 percent of the cases are from Central Luzon, and 23 percent are from Calabarzon.
The remaining cases were from National Capital Region (13 percent); Central Visayas (10 percent); and other regions (8 percent).
Vergeire said they observed the spike in the number of fatalities since last month, which also coincided with the influx of daily new Covid-19 cases, rising to 4,000 to as high as over 10,000.
As of Saturday (April 10), DOH registered 12,674 new Covid-19 cases and 225 related fatalities.
Health officials attributed the spike in Covid-19 cases last month to multiple factors, including the lax public compliance to quarantine protocols and the spread of the more infectious variants of the said disease.
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