It's been a horrible 2021 and the first two months of 2022 looked bleak when the Philippines suffered wave after wave when a new variant of concert sprouted. I anticipate how we the Health Agency will announce the daily numbers beginning tomorrow.

For today, the DoH announces 870 new cases (92% of which are 'recent') with the NCR, CALABARZON and Western Visayas leading the regions for most number of cases.

There were 24543 tests done last March 4, with a positivity rate of 3.9%.

This brings the active cases now to lower than 49,000, with more than 91% of them being mild or asymptomatic at the time of testing.

The deaths have now surpassed the 57000 mark with the additional 144 deaths recorded today. Of the deaths added today, 12 occurred in march, 64 in February and 48 last January, or 85% of deaths from January to March 2022 added today. The remaining deaths were from September to December 2021.

THE WEEK IN REVIEW

This week closed with good news. The Philippines finally met the 7-day moving average with triple digits and ends with 952 average daily cases as of March 5, 2022. The deaths were erratic as many backlogs from 2020-2021 started pouring in this week as well. The 7-day average deaths is at 76 deaths/day.

Elsewhere in neighboring Asia, countries which began with managing the pandemic on a high note are now affected with the omicron wave.

Worst hit is Hong Kong with more than 5000/million population new daily cases. Based on a 7-day moving average Hong Kong is averaging 42,000 new daily cases, South Korea at almost 200,000 and Vietnam at 100,000. Indonesia, a country with almost 4x the population of the Philippines is ahead of the PH with 134 cases/M population, while the PH is lowest at around 10/M population.

The effective reproduction rate is a good indicator on how the pandemic is being managed in the respective countries. When reproduction numbers stay at 1.0, this implies that the previous numbers will most likely carry on in the same quantity in the subsequent week. Rt >1 puts the country at highest risk of increasing numbers. For example, Vietnam, South Korea and Thailand still have Rt >1.25. This implies that they have not peaked yet and are most likely to see soaring numbers in the next week.

On the other hand, the PH and Indonesia have Rt at 0.59 and 0.79, respectively. This augurs well for these countries. As the numbers are now lower than other nations in the Asian region, the low Rt allows more elbow room for the numbers to continue to decline. The positivity rate for the Philippines stands at <5% (low risk).