Metro Manila’s COVID-19 cases are expected to reach their peak in either mid or late May, an expert from the University of the Philippines (UP) said today.
In an interview with cable news channel ANC, Teodoro Herbosa, one of the leaders of UP’s Response Team said, “For Metro Manila, it seems we’re nearing the peak. I think it will be mid-May or late May that we’ll actually peak and start to go down in terms of numbers…I think the numbers are plateauing based on new cases.”
Metro Manila is the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines. In Quezon City alone, there are more than 1,000 people who have been infected with the viral respiratory disease.
“The confirmed cases may increase because of the number of testing centers…but I’m relying more on the new cases reported,” he said, and added that for the past several days, the Department of Health (DOH) has been reporting around 200 or so new cases.
However, Herbosa said that the testing rate of the DOH remains below average.
Read: At least 40 staff at RITM infected with coronavirus, lab scales down operation
“That’s the other thing the statisticians are saying; we can’t give correct predictions because our testing is too low,” he said.
Herbosa’s statement comes as DOH Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire admitted today in a presser on state television PTV that the government will miss its target of completing 8,000 tests a day by April 30.
“It doesn’t appear that we will reach 8,000 for April 30 though we will try because we have already received the cartridges from GeneXpert,” she said.
Tests using GeneXpert kits can be completed within an hour, Rappler reports, unlike the real-time polymerase chain reaction kits that could take an entire day to process.
As of yesterday, the DOH was able to complete only 4,900 tests in a day. Vergeire said this was due to the slow down of operations at the government-managed Research Institute of Tropical Medicine, where at least 40 employees were infected with the coronavirus.
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