MANILA, April 20 ----- he Philippines' tally of active COVID-19 cases climbed back over 10,000 with 287 new infections reported by the Department of Health.
The caseload stood at 10,263, the DOH's COVID-19 Tracker showed. Three years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, the Philippines has recorded 4,086,620 cases. The country's first confirmed infection was recorded on Jan. 30, 2020. Majority or 98 percent have recovered from COVID-19 while 66,443 have succumbed to the disease.
In a press briefing Tuesday, DOH officer-in-charge Maria Rosario Vergeire noted there was an uptick in the virus tally but hospital utilization remained manageable. The WHO warned the pandemic was still volatile, saying there could be further trouble before the virus settles into a predictable pattern. While the numbers are decreasing, "that's still a lot of people dying and that's still a lot of people getting sick", WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan told a press conference Tuesday.
The WHO's emergency committee on COVID-19 meets every three months and is due to assemble in early May. As at its previous meetings, it will decide whether the virus still constitutes a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) — the highest level of alert that the UN health agency can sound. The WHO declared COVID-19 a PHEIC on Jan. 30, 2020, when there were fewer than 100 cases and no deaths outside China.
But it was not until WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described the situation as a pandemic in March 2020 that the world jolted into action.
Source: news.abs-cbn.com
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