The Health Department has noticed an increase in the number of symptomatic patients among the new cases of COVID-19 in Cebu. |Contributed File Photo
CEBU CITY, Philippines — Health officials have noted an increase in the number of symptomatic patients among the new cases of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) that have been reported recently.
Dr. Jaime Bernadas, Department of Health in Central Visayas (DOH-7) regional director, said this development was what the health care system would need to address as the increase in symptomatic patients would correspond to the increase of admissions in hospitals.
Bernadas, in a virtual press conference on Thursday, June 11, however, denied that the hospitals in the tri-cities were already “overwhelmed” with the number of admissions.
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He said that what was being filled up in the hospitals now were the dedicated rooms for COVID-19 patients and not the entire facilities. The hospitals, he said, would still be able to cater to other patients.
Bernadas explained that when the preparation of the medical facilities for COVID-19 started, each hospital declared a specific number of dedicated rooms and intensive care units (ICUs) for COVID-19 patients.
However, the hospitals started to reduce this pledged capacity as most of the cases logged in the past two months were asymptomatic. Hence, they did not need to be admitted to the hospitals.
With the increase in the number of patients that might need to be placed under hospital care, Bernadas said the medical facilities would responding accordingly by re-increasing the number of their rooms dedicated to COVID-19 cases.
No ‘spike’ in cases
Despite recording over 100 daily cases of COVID-19 in Cebu in the past five days, Bernadas maintained that there was no “spike” in the rate of the infection.
Bernadas reiterated that the positive test results that were being reported recently were backlogs from the samples extracted in the last two weeks, or from May 24 to June 6, 2020.
“The backlogs had been accumulated during the past two weeks. The past two weeks are reflective of those specimen submitted earlier… Meaning, these are all cases during the time [when] we were still on ECQ,” Bernadas said.
Read more: Cebu City has 104 new cases, 3 recoveries, 1 death
For Cebu City alone, the number of new cases reported daily in the past five days range from 101 to 127.
“We have already corrected the data. They were attributed to the days when [the specimen] were collected and to the days when the symptoms started,” he said.
“We have already done the epidemic curve for that and we really found no notable spike in our number of cases. They are distributed, more or less, evenly, although, we also noticed an increasing number of symptomatic cases,” Bernadas said./dbs