DOH explains why there are more COVID-19 deaths than recoveries
As the death toll due to coronavirus disease (COVID-19) reached 152, the Department of Health (DOH) on Sunday said there were more recorded deaths than recoveries because the government first conducted tests to vulnerable or high-risk people.
“As of now, the number of death count is higher than the recoveries because we just started conducting expanded testing where a lot of people under the vulnerable or high-risk population group are undergoing testing,” DOH Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said in a virtual press briefing.
“If you can recall, our protocol is we test the severely ill and vulnerable population that’s why we have a lot of death cases than those who were able to recover,” she added.
Vergeire said the time of recovery of the patients was also longer, thus, there were only few recovered patients as of the moment.
“Based on the study, from the onset of symptoms, a patient with mild symptoms can recover up to two weeks while three to six weeks for those who have severe and critical case… that’s why we have a lot of active cases (which) were not labeled as recovered,” she said.
The health official attributed the increase of COVID-19 cases, which were 3,246 as of Sunday afternoon after 152 new reported cases, on the more available testing kits in the country.
As of Sunday afternoon also, Vergeire said there were seven additional recoveries bringing the total number of recovered patients to 64 while eight of the positive cases died, bringing the number of fatalities to 152.
“Slowly, we are now decreasing our backlogs that’s why we can now see the real-time case of COVID-19,” she said.
The health official said the DOH has already tested 19,585 individuals, including the repeated tests conducted to positive COVID-19 patients.
“They always underwent testing to monitor the progress of their health,” she said.
“We also want to inform the public that on the total individuals tested for COVID-19, 83 percent were negative results,” she added.
The DOH is eyeing to conduct 8,000 to 10,000 tests per day once the massive testing begins on April 14.
“As of now, we have eight laboratories in the country that have the capability to conduct test up to 1,200 individual per day… we are also now assessing 78 laboratories if these can be used as COVID testing centers… this is across the country,” Vergeire said.
“Hopefully we can meet this number of tests,” she added.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), to date, there were already 1,051,635 confirmed COVID-19 cases, including 56,985 deaths, worldwide. Ella Dionisio/DMS
