A year after imposing lockdowns in the country to contain the pandemic, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said the government’s Covid response has “improved so much.”
This, as Vergeire confirmed that 11 cities in Metro Manila were detected to have the B.1.1.7 (UK ) variant while seven cities have cases of B.1.351 (South Africa) variant. She also said that seven cities have both the UK and South Africa variants
In a media forum, Vergeire recalled that in July and August when the cases started to increase, the situation was a bit chaotic.
“We were not used to handle many Covid cases but as compared to the situation before, now doctors have wide array or options to manage cases,” she said.
She noted that the case fatality rate was also maintained at 2 percent or ” a little above 2 percent.”
The health system, she added, also improved when it comes to bed allocation.
“All hospitals are able to allocate beds appropriately according to the standard,” she said adding that the creation of One Hospital Command helped in assisting Covid-19 patients to be accommodated in quarantine facilities for proper treatment.
Also, she stressed from one laboratory- the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine , there are now over 220 laboratories in the country.
Covid cases
On Friday, the DOH logged 4,578 additional Covid-19 cases, highest since September last year.
The total number of infections in the country stood at 611,618.
Of the total number of cases, 8.5 percent (52,012) are active, 89.4 percent (546,912), and 2.08 percent (12,694) have died.
Five laboratories were not able to submit their data to the Covid-19 Document Repository System on March 11, 2021.