ALTHOUGH the All Experts Group has yet to recommend Covid-19 booster shots, a Department of Health official said the agency is considering including the booster shots in the 2022 budget of the DOH.
“Pinag-aaralan pa ‘yan kung kailangan ng booster [That is being studied if a booster is needed], although we are considering it in the 2022 budget,” said Health Undersecretary Myrna Cabotaje, chief of the National Vaccination Operations Center, during the virtual Kapihan Session of the DOH on Thursday.
She said that the All Experts Group of the DOH has yet to make a recommendation on the booster shots in a month or two.
Vaccines administered
Meanwhile, Cabotaje said a total of 29,127,240 Covid vaccines were administered: 16,250,043 for first doses and 12,877,197 for second doses.
She said a total of 42,620,800 Covid-19 vaccine doses were delivered to the country, of which 15,936,260 were donated and the rest was procured.
Covid cases
The DOH logged 14,895 additional Covid-19 cases on Thursday, bringing the total number of infections to 1,791,003.
There were also 8,248 recoveries and 258 deaths.
Of the total number of cases, 6.2 percent (111,720) are active, 92.0 percent (1,648,402) have recovered, and 1.72 percent (30,881) have died.
There were 387 duplicates removed from the total case count. Of these, 385 are recoveries.
Moreover, two cases previously tagged as recoveries have been validated to be active cases and 180 cases previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after final validation.
All laboratories were operational on August 17, 2021 while two laboratories were not able to submit their data to the Covid-19 Document Repository System.
Based on data in the last 14 days, the two non-reporting laboratories contribute, on average, 0.2 percent of samples tested and 0.3 percent of positive individuals.