SELECT National Capital Region (NCR) areas and Davao City were among the places flagged by the Department of Health (DOH) because of their “high risk” case metrics, as well as their health care and intensive care unit (ICU) utilization rates that were tagged “high to critical risk.”
Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said that with high-risk two-week growth rates or average daily attack rate recorded in select NCR areas and Davao City, “We do not compare counts alone as they are all of equal importance based on these metrics.”
Vergeire also clarified that Davao City is not currently the “epicenter” despite the increase in cases recorded.
“Epicenter, in relation to epidemics, are interpreted by some to refer to an area as the source of the infection. It is also meant to connote the area as a hotspot for the infection. We discourage the use of the term “epicenter” in describing the rise of cases in an area,” she explained.
She stressed, “These areas are not the origin of the Covid-19 virus. Moreover, using the term ‘epicenter’ detracts from other surrounding areas which may be equally or more affected by Covid-19.”
Nonetheless, Vergeire clarified, “Considering this, no, Davao City is not an epicenter. We continue to closely monitor the situation in Davao City due to increasing cases,” she added.
On Tuesday, the OCTA Research noted a 44-percent increase in cases on the first week of June in Davao City.
With this, OCTA said that Davao City has overtaken Quezon City when it comes to new cases recorded.
Covid cases
On Wednesday the DOH logged 5,462 additional Covid-19 cases, bringing the total number of infections in the country to 1,286,217.
There were also 7,854 recoveries and 126 deaths.
Of the total number of cases, 4.2 percent (54,000) are active cases, 94.1 percent (1,210,027) have recovered, and 1.73 percent (22,190) have died.
Eighteen duplicates were removed from the total case count. Of these, 14 are recoveries.
Moreover, 70 cases previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after final validation.
All laboratories were operational on June 7, 2021 but eight failed to submit their data to the Covid-19 Document Repository System.
Based on data in the last 14 days, the eight non-reporting labs contribute, on average, 2.1 percent of samples tested and 2.7 percent of positive individuals.