DOH urges people to be more cautious as COVID-19 cases rise

July 7, 2020

The Department of Health urged people to be more cautious as the coronavirus disease ( COVID-19) cases have been rising in the past four days.

In a television interview  Tuesday, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said: ''This is not just because we are testing more but because there are really cases, there are really clustering of cases that we have been identifying for these past days."

"These numbers that we are having right now should make people more cautious," she added.

Vergeire said the DOH has seen clustering of cases in a total of 378 barangays in Metro Manila cities and in Cebu City.

She said several areas have been seeing a sharp increase in cases in the past week.

They include Cebu City, Cebu Province, Lapu-Lapu City, Mandaue City in Central Visayas, as well as the City of Manila and Quezon City in Metro Manila.

"So this is not just because we are testing more, but this is really a result of community transmission," said Vergeire.

She said the case fatality rate (CFR) has been gradually going down since the start of the pandemic.

"We can see that the deaths here in the country are slowly going down. It is really decreasing. We are only at 2.9 percent case fatality rate," said Vergeire.

She said the number is a big improvement from the over 10 percent CFR when the pandemic started.

In May, the Philippines CFR was at 5.52 percent, before going down to 4.24 percent in June.

Vergeire said the decline in CFR can be attributed to improving capabilities of the healthcare workers.

"We are seeing lesser deaths because clinicians now have more evidence and information for them to be able to manage and support patients," she said.

Vergeire said majority of COVID-19 cases or 93 percent, are considered as "mild"; while the "severe" and "critical" cases are at 0.8 percent. DMS