{"id":3814,"date":"2022-01-05T12:28:57","date_gmt":"2022-01-05T12:28:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/getmeds.ph\/blog\/?p=3814"},"modified":"2022-03-07T06:45:38","modified_gmt":"2022-03-07T06:45:38","slug":"philippines-faces-an-enormous-covid-19-wave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/getmeds.ph\/blog\/philippines-faces-an-enormous-covid-19-wave\/","title":{"rendered":"The Philippines Faces an Enormous Covid-19 Wave; Omicron Could be the Dominant Strain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><span data-preserver-spaces=\"true\">Manila:\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><span data-preserver-spaces=\"true\">The Philippines is seeing the sudden omicron variant rise with Covid-19 infection by the end of this month. The researchers said the current wave spreads twice as fast as last year, produced by another highly contagious variant delta. <\/span><span data-preserver-spaces=\"true\">Philippines&#8217; senior health officer told Omicron could be the prevalent variant in three to four weeks, replacing the Delta variant.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-preserver-spaces=\"true\">Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire spoke at a news briefing that with covid-19 cases increasing rapidly in the past two weeks, the Philippines was also at high risk for conditions. <\/span><span data-preserver-spaces=\"true\">Dr Edsel Salvana, an infectious disease specialist and an advisor to the Health Ministry, stated that while there has, however, to be definitive evidence of Omicron-fuelled community transmission, &#8220;there&#8217;s a chance that Omicron is already spreading&#8221;.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-preserver-spaces=\"true\">This is established on the number of people with conditions, particularly among the vaccinated and those who have already had their booster shots, and the exponential growth in cases, &#8220;though we still don&#8217;t know the proportion&#8221;, he added.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-preserver-spaces=\"true\">Most cases have been in Metro Manila &#8211; an urban sprawl of 16 cities home to more than 13 million. There were 3,317 new infections on Jan 2, up from just 97 on Dec 20. The area tallied a total of 10,292 new cases in the past two weeks.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-preserver-spaces=\"true\">But with 95 per cent of the region&#8217;s population having at least one dose of a vaccine, the government is confident a majority of cases will be mild or moderate, and hospitals will not be overwhelmed with patients with severe symptoms.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-preserver-spaces=\"true\">Restaurants, churches, restaurant dine-in services, amusement parks, tourist attractions, beauty salons and fitness studios would open at lower capacities.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-preserver-spaces=\"true\">Meanwhile, the Tourism Ministry is continuing its probe on hotels designated as quarantine facilities that allow overseas travellers to leave before they complete their mandatory quarantine.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Manila:\u00a0The Philippines is seeing the sudden omicron variant rise with Covid-19 infection by the end of this month. The researchers said the current wave spreads twice as fast as last year, produced by another highly&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3819,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[520],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/getmeds.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/getmeds.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/getmeds.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getmeds.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getmeds.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3814"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/getmeds.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3822,"href":"https:\/\/getmeds.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3814\/revisions\/3822"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getmeds.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/getmeds.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getmeds.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/getmeds.ph\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}