CEBU CITY, Philippines – Cebu City, on January 19, 2022, broke its own record in the number of new cases registered in a day.
This after the city logged 732 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, according to the latest bulletin from the Department of Health in Central Visayas (DOH-7).
This is the highest number of additional COVID patients the city recorded in a day since the pandemic started in 2020.
As a result, the city’s total number of active COVID-19 cases jumped back to 4,385.
Only 49 recoveries related to the infection were recorded in Cebu City on January 19. The city, on the same day, also registered seven COVID-related deaths, bringing the toll to 1,534.
Cebu City is placed under Alert Level 3 since January 14 due to the continuing spike of new COVID cases.
Local officials here believed the surge could be driven by the highly transmissible Omicron variant.
At least 22 patients in Central Visayas, where Cebu belonged, have been confirmed to have the mutated strain of the virus.
Critical care occupancy rate in Cebu City has also begun to increase.
Based on the COVID tracker of the DOH, occupancy rate for COVID-dedicated beds here has reached 59.5 percent as of January 18.
This meant that 391 of the 657 beds deployed for infected patients have already been occupied, and only 266 remained vacant.
Hospital occupancy levels are used to gauge the gravity of the outbreak in a certain area.
/bmjo
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