The Department of Health (DOH) on Monday issued an advisory to local government units to help prevent Covid vaccine wastage in their vaccination sites.
Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said that the freezers should be monitored “Monday to Friday, 24/7 and the checking should be done every four hours”.
On May 10, authorities in the municipality of Makilala in Cotabato discovered that 348 doses of Coronovac were damaged after a brownout hit the place where the vaccines were stored on May 7 and the freezer was not turned back on because it was unplugged.
Vergeire said that the Inter-Agency Task Force has approved the inclusion of “all governors and city and municipal mayors or all local chief executives” under the Priority Group A1.5 of the priority population groups for Covid-19 vaccines.
“Regardless of the risk classification of their respective local government units,” Vergeire said, local officials are also “vulnerable” to infection because they continue to inspect their respective areas and their constituents as they respond to the pandemic.
Covid cases
As of 4 p.m. on Monday, the DOH logged 5,979 additional Covid-19 cases, bringing the total number of infections in the country to 1,149,925.
There were also 6,602 recoveries 72 deaths.
Of the total number of cases, 4.7 percent (54,235) are active cases, 93.6 percent (1,076,428) have recovered, and 1.68 percent (19,262) have died.
Morever, 31 cases that were previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after final validation.
All laboratories were operational on May 15, 2021.
Five labs were not able to submit their data to the Covid-19 Document Repository System.
Based on data in the last 14 days, the 5 non-reporting labs contribute, on average, 0.7 percent of samples tested and 1.0 percent of positive individuals.
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