Infectious diseases and clinical pharmacology expert Dr. Benjamin Co has been thankfully breaking down coronavirus numbers in his personal blog since the outbreak started. The perspective he provides is informative, and comforting in those who are craving for a clear picture of how we are faring against the virus. Dr. Co will share daily updates and analysis of the Department of Health reported numbers with ANCX.
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It’s been almost six months since the beginning of this pandemic, depending on whose timeline you’re looking at). In the Philippines, you will agree with me that our lives have been in pause for a quarter. As the rainy season sets in, June is fast coming to a close, but the numbers just keep on coming.
I am separating the daily data summary of this coronavirus pandemic in this blog site. It will be separated into two as in The Brief: The World and The Philippines. Some analysis will be provided in between, but it will mostly be graphs and numbers.
Data as of June 10, 2020, 8 P.M.
Surprise? Today we have 740 new confirmed cases. It’s the highest number of cases since the DoH broke down the cases as either “fresh” or “late.” There are more “fresh” cases at 452 and fewer “late” at 288. For fresh cases, the most numbers are coming from “others” with 277 cases followed by National Capital Region with 91, Region VII with 83, and repatriates with one. Among the late cases, 142 are coming from “others,” followed by NCR with 100, repatriates with 45, and Region VII with one case. (“Others” is defined as areas outside of NCR and Region VII.)
In short, of the 740 cases today, “other” areas may account for 430 of the haul. [However, based on the data drop, these are “for validation.”] NCR accounts for 191. Region VII accounts for 84. Repatriates account for 46. “Other” areas accounting for more than 58 percent of today’s cases (and has been noted in the previous days) is worrisome as the transmission may be spreading in the peripheral communities. Hence, the importance of identifying these “other” places where the positive cases are being reported daily. We are, after all, not mind readers nor can we best guess where these positive cases are coming from.
Of the 17,239 ongoing active cases, almost 99.5 percent are mild or active. While only 0.4 percent are severe, there is a rise in severe cases from 47 yesterday to 64 today. Critical cases remain the same at 19 (0.1 percent). Most likely, the majority of the identified cases are from contact tracing.
ABS-CBN Data analytics – @Edson Guido
Over the past eight days, a dramatic rise in fresh cases is seen in Region VII and areas tagged as “others.” As a matter of fact, over the last week alone, there have been more cases in Region VII and “others” than NCR. Today, however, while NCR (91) has more fresh cases than Region VII (83), the other unidentified locations haul in 277 cases.
The day before
Based on the breakdown in data reported yesterday, June 9, 2020, of the 518 cases announced by the Department of Health (DoH), only 285 had residence information: 169 cases were reported in Luzon, 86 in Visayas, five in Mindanao, and 25 among repatriates. As mentioned in past COVID updates, it is disturbing that not all the 518 cases had residence information. That means that we have no information as to where 233 cases reported yesterday are actually from because they fall under the classification “for validation.”
Based on data as of yesterday, NCR has additional 1,308 cases in the past seven days, eking past Central Visayas that recorded 1,220 additional cases over the past seven days.
The list above shows the cities that were reported to have more than three confirmed cases. There is one long list of cities reporting one or two cases yesterday. These include two cases each for Makati; Mandaue, Cebu; Biñan, Laguna; San Jose del Monte, Bulacan; and Agno, Pangasinan. There was one case apiece for Parañaque; Taguig; Pasay; Muntinlupa; San Juan; Las Piñas; Davao City; Malabon; Navotas; Cainta, Rizal; Dasmariñas, Cavite; Taytay, Rizal; Santa Rosa, Laguna; Minglanilla, Cebu; Lucena, Quezon; Cavite City; La Trinidad, Benguet; and Guinayangan, Quezon.
Madridejos, Cebu reported their first case yesterday.
The data coming in from “other” areas is bothersome because they now comprise the bulk of cases in the Philippines and the locality of these cases need to be identified. Seriously, if you don’t know where these cases are from, how can you even do contact tracing properly?
The continued rise in ‘fresh’ cases in Central Visayas is worrisome because the seven-day average growth rate is now highest in the country at 5.85 percent with a doubling time of 11 days (linear scale, or around three to four days on a logarithmic scale). With three additional deaths yesterday (according to the official DoH website), the CFR now stands at 1.11 percent and the region has 502 cases/million population.
Compare this to NCR whose seven-day average growth rate is 1.57 percent and a doubling time of 44 days (linear scale or > 10 days on a logarithmic scale). NCR has 981 cases/M population. The CFR of the NCR is lower at 5.99 percent (compared to yesterday’s 6.15 percent, with only one additional death).
Total tests done as of June 8, 2020 is 451,625 in 416,201 unique individuals. This is equivalent to testing 4,125/million population. There were more than 10,000 tests done on June 7 with the government ranging from 9,000 to 12,500 tests done per day over the last week. There are still 2815 samples in the backlog not processed as of time of report.
While the positivity rate is seven percent for the country in general, if you break down the facilities, note how the positivity rate varies among the various facilities. The highest positivity rate for example is at the Dr. Jose N. Rodriguez Memorial Hospital and Sanatorium where out of 206 samples it has tested, 35.4 percent yielded positive results. The hospital is located in Caloocan, which ranks sixth based on total cases by city.
Other facilities with > 10 percent positivity rate include Tondo Medical Center GeneExpert Laboratory (18.5 percent); St. Luke’s QC (18.5 percent); Cebu TB Reference Laboratory and Molecular Facility (16.1 percent); Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center (15.7 percent); Lung Center of the Philippines (15.4 percent); UP National Institute of Health (14.2 percent); UP Philippine Genome Center (14.2 percent); Allegiant Regional Care Hospital (13.8 percent); National Kidney and Transplant Institute (12.8 percent); The Medical City (12.8 percent); Chinese General Hospital (12.4 percent); and Zamboanga City Medical Center GeneExpert (10.2 percent).
Data from summarized from the DoH’s COVID-19 tracker.
The location of the testing facilities correlate well with the positivity rate based on location of COVID-19 cases in the country. First, majority of these testing facilities reporting the highest results are government facilities where most of those from the lower socioeconomic class would go to for RT-PCR testing. Second is that the highest cases are also located in these areas: Quezon City, Cebu City, Manila, Pasig, and Zamboanga City.
The above data implies that we will be seeing more cases in these places for quite sometime. Sadly, it looks like the numbers are not going to dramatically come down anytime soon, especially in these areas where facilities report > 10 percent positivity rates.
Cebu City now ranks number one among the top ten cities in the country with the most number of cases in the country overtaking all cities in the National Capital Region.
There are now 42 licensed RT-PCR laboratories and 14 licensed Gene Xpert Laboratories in the country.
[Disclaimer: All data are verified based on the Data Drop of the Department of Health. All information used in the analysis are from the Health Agency’s data drop site.]
The world
Almost four million are closed and have outcomes. Ninety percent of the outcomes are recovered while the remaining 10 percent died. Only 45 percent of the remaining 3.3 million are active cases with 98 percent mild or asymptomatic and two percent serious or critical.
A spike in cases today makes us jump back to over and additional 120,000 cases today.
The deaths are up at with 4,732 additional deaths today, which is a large leap from 3,157 deaths yesterday.
The United States of America leads among the top ten countries in the world based on total number of cases with over two million cases now. Among the countries in the top 10, the United Kingdom and Spain have the highest case fatality rates, at 14.1 percent and 11.21 percent respectively.
The top 10 countries alone total almost five million cases, contributing to more than two-thirds of the cases in the world daily.
Infection density is an important parameter to determine the extent of the infection based on the population of the country. For example, a country may report only 1,000 cases. But if they have only 100,000 people in that nation, it may seem that there are a few cases while in actuality, for every one million people in that country, 10,000 cases would be positive.
In terms of infection density (the number of people who are positive based on the cases per million people), Qatar has the highest infection density with 25,380 cases/million population. The United States, while having more than two million cases is 10th with 6,017 cases/million population. The Philippines is at 110th with 212 cases/million population. (This is based on data as of June 9, 2020.)
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- Cities with high death rates like Lipa, Naga, and Dumaguete should do more contact tracing
- Lipa, San Juan, Muntinlupa, and Pasig have the highest COVID death rates among PH cities
- Total number of COVID cases increase by 1,200 in Region 7, making it the highest in PH
- Outbreaks in cities with little to no previous COVID cases must be closely monitored
The global case fatality rate is lower at 5.64 percent while recovery rates are at 49.3 percent. For every one death, there are approximately 9 recoveries.
The ASEAN average for case fatalities is 2.5 percent, much lower than the global average of 5.64 percent. Among the ASEAN countries, the highest fatality rate is Indonesia (6 percent) while the Philippines sees another lower fatality rate today at 4.33 percent with 10 deaths reported.
The ASEAN average for recovery is at 56 percent compared to the global recovery rate at 49.3 percent. The recovery rate of the Philippines remains at 20.6 percent in spite of the 159 recoveries.