Gov't monitoring surges in 22 areas outside Metro Manila

MANILA – The government is monitoring the growth rate of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) cases in 22 areas outside Metro Manila, Malacañang said Wednesday.

Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles, acting presidential spokesperson, said authorities are in close coordination with the regional Interagency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID) and are looking closely at the following areas:

- Calabarzon
- Central Luzon
- Ilocos Region
- Dagupan City
- Cordillera Administrative Region
- Baguio City
- Cebu Province
- Cebu City
- Lapu-lapu City
- Mandaue City
- Iloilo Province
- Iloilo City
- Bacolod City
- Cagayan de Oro City
- Davao City
- General Santos City
- Ormoc City
- Naga City
- Western Samar
- Tacloban City
- Biliran
- Zamboanga del Sur

"What we're seeing now is while cases in Metro Manila and in fact some areas in Region 4-A and 3 are slowing down in terms of the growth rate, we're seeing higher growth rates in those (abovementioned) areas," he said in a CNN Philippines interview.

Nograles said these areas of concern must further increase hospital bed capacities for Covid-19 patients to prevent their respective health care utilization rate (HCUR) from exceeding 70 percent.

Meanwhile, the government is beefing up telemedicine services in said areas to prepare patients who will go into home isolation should the number of cases further balloon.

"Like what happened here in NCR, we reserved the beds for severe and critical and moderate cases while mild and asymptomatic can do home isolation," Nograles said.

The official said the government is also set to announce Metro Manila's alert level for February 1 to 15 over the weekend. He said an IATF-EID meeting is scheduled for January 27.

"That would be one of the topics that we will be discussing. We'll look at what the numbers look like in terms of bed utilization rate, the average daily attack rate (ADAR), and the two-week growth rate," he said.

"[P]erhaps we'll have to make a decision as far as Metro Manila is concerned over the weekend because the weekend is closer to February 1 and what we want to do is to make a decision on alert levels as closest to February 1 as possible," he said. (PNA)