Raffin

https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/news...il-time/story/

Pateros is a municipality in Manila, no city status. Population about 70k with only 270 confirmed cases so far. Around the same as IloIlo City, with a much larger population. But one of them was their Health chief. He died at the end of July. I know the place a bit and it does have a number of tight, densely populated streets, But no slums. So the face shield ordinance maybe a panic measure?

I wouldn't be surprised if some other places in Manila follow to show to the government how tough they are being.

Raffin

Yesterday was the eleventh day in a row that the DOH reported the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the country had increased by more than 3000 (see DOh case bulletin #148 on Fb). But if you look there you will also see a lot of late reporting. For the whole country over 1,000 cases were from March to July...so the headline is misleading.

For the NCR epicenter it was as follows:
March 43,April 27,May 96, June 30, July 512..."on time" during August were 992. So over 700 "late".

Seems a lot of results fell down the back of a filing cabinet!

A similar situation with cases in the provinces surrounding Manila, and with deaths nationally and especially the NCR and Visayas, although that is more understandable.

Not the first time this has happened. Decisions are being taken without the up to date official figures, let alone the likely many unrecorded ones.

Bealinehx

"Seems a lot of results fell down the back of a filing cabinet!"
Surely not! Didn't they use File 13?

Raffin

https://www.asianjournal.com/busines...-half-of-2020/

Out of over 1,000. I think this is the first announcement of nationwide branch closures from any iconic business chain.
I expect more in retail and banks.

Gazza-d

Yet they plan to open another 338 stores. Just clearing out the dead wood and moving their liabilities from company owned stores to franchises.

Raffin

I think only a fraction of those hundreds of worldwide branch openings will go ahead, especially here and in the US. hey're just making the statement look optimistic. Yes, those earmarked for closure now were probably not doing well before the pandemic, but until dine ins can pack them in again, which might be a long time in the future, many more will become dead wood.

Raffin

https://rappler.com/nation/metro-man...says-lorenzana

Instead of citing over 6,000 cases on August 4 the defesce secretary should have known that many of those were reported late. Accurate figures are not available to us but the true figure for recent cases at that time is likely well under 4,000. So a drop to 3,200 or so is not significant. Why here non health government ministers and spokesmen are allowed to pronounce on this type of issue, given the well publicized data problems at the DOH, escapes me.

Bealinehx

It escapes everyone. Too many ego's at play.

Raffin

https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/news...or-free/story/

They know something about China but few people here know much about Russia and its practices. A vaccine is on a different level to guns.

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/...a-pandoras-box

Raffin

https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/131932...datory-for-now

Not mandatory ...for now...but from reading this it's maybe only a matter of time before we will be required to have one on outside of the house. On top of a mask. The President's spokesman has talked about it as possibly one of the conditions for Manila to revert to GCQ. in a week's time. We can see that MECQ has done nothing much to control the outbreak..in fact testing is finding many more cases. Several government leaders have said people will go hungry if the business closures are continued, as they cannot afford more dole outs. So a reversion to some form of GCQ looks inevitable. Any new measures, plans to be announced eg steps to improve testing and tracing will be viewed sceptically so I feel that mainly for PR reasons the admin will want to be seen to act tough on the population for their supposed indiscipline. Photos of people in the streets looking like COVID-19 nurses and doctors would go around the world.

https://philippineslifestyle.com/dep...hers-covid-19/

Schools are re-opening on August 24. The President is not allowing face to face classes, but there will be some online learning and xeroxed materials distributed. The mix depending on conditions in the area. But to prepare teachers have to meet up regularly in schools and we can see from this news item that the Dep Ed and the government generally doesn't see any problems with that. Where we live the local National High School is being used as a Covid isolation facility!

Raffin

So many issues with the official covid data put out here...missing details on forms so tracing difficult, labs emailing to the DOH rather than use the dedicated system, late reporting, sometimes by months, changes in definitions etc

These are the notes on Covid deaths from yesterday's DOH Covid case bulletin #151 on Facebook."Of the 93 deaths, 13 (14%) in August, 49 (53%) in July, 30 (32%) in June, and 1 (1%) in May. Deaths were from Region 7 (67 or 72%), NCR(16 or 17%), Region 9 (3 or 3%), Region 6 (2 or 2%), Region 5 (2 or 2%), Region 11 (2 or 2%), and Region 4A (1 or 2%).

There were 231 duplicates that were removed from the total case count. Of these, nine (9) recovered cases and one (1) death have been removed.

In addition, two (2) cases were found to be negative and were removed from the total case count after final validation. Moreover, we updated the health status of the 62 cases that were previously reported as recovered but after final validation, they were deaths (60) and active (2) cases.

These numbers undergo constant cleaning and validation".

This information is not given on the online websites. It tells you 93 deaths are reported. What? Normally daily figures are much lower. At first you think it's just due to late reporting and the removal of duplicates. But read on to the end where it tells you there were 62 cases previously reported as recoveries that are now nearly all deaths.
Not just yesterday. Reading the DOH notes from previous days the same thing was reported on a smaller scale:

August 9: 20 recoveries and all really died
August 8: 20 recoveries of which 11 really died
August 7: 23 recoveries and all really died.

The Philippines currently reports a death to case rate better than the average world and ASEAN rates. One of the few encouraging features of its outbreak. But can we now believe that, even on the official figures? The Philippines recovery rate is already above the international and ASEAN averages.

At the end of July the media picked up on the DOH reclassifying 38,000 active cases as recovered. They had some justification to do that following WHO guidelines. I don't watch any local TV but from what I read online nobody is picking up on this now. Maybe too much going on with issues like Philhealth for the lone GMA to report on this sort of thing? Or they are scared to?
As we wait to see if we can go to a barber shop and salon next week the administration have come out with a new plan....the 21 areas in the NCR and adjoining provinces will each be overseen by one or two(!!) members of the cabinet:

https://news.abs-cbn.com/news/08/12/...-in-mecq-areas

Don't these people have enough to do already? In other countries this would just be done by the DOH and the Secretary of the Interior.

To give hope to people here that there is really light at the end of the tunnel I see that the Philippines is going to do some trials of the Russian vaccine. I watched an interview on CNN with the head of the Russian company developing their vaccine. It was clear from what he said that very few people have been vaccinated in their trials. Even if a lot had been I just remember what happened with dope tests on their athletes a few years ago. There's push back on using it here from the experts, but it may be tried as it is free and comes from a country the President obviously admires. Maybe too late but much better to follow Indonesia and develop one with foreign help:

https://rappler.com/world/asia-pacif...avirus-vaccine

Let's see what other ideas will be announced early next week, when the decision on the quarantine status in Manila and its adjoining provinces will be made. They need to be convincing as people here are seeing all the numbers getting rapidly worse. Also the Palace spokesman has now admitted they should be doing a lot better.

The RC Church here will start a month of prayer to heal Covid on August 15.

Bealinehx

Raffin,
Thank you for your analysis which confirms my suspicions about the accuracy of reporting.
To quote from a well known person from history "Forgive them Father for they know not what they do"
Allocating oversight of mecq areas to members of the administration smacks of panic.
Yesterday a friend of mine departed for Switzerland complete with numerous pieces of paper to allow him passage to NAIA and access to his flight.

jaygee68

Good work Raffin.Thanks,but you certainly left the best til last.

"The RC Church here will start a month of prayer to heal Covid on August 15."...

Raffin

https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/news...story/?just_in

Surveys say that the great majority of Filipinos follow the protocols here to their best ability. Again the military mindset wrongly aiming for 100 per cent compliance. Will certainly annoy people who may be already be feeling targeted unfairly. I'm sure Barangay officials already have enough on their plate without this. Made me think of ARP warden Hodges in Dad's Army.

Since the virus is circulating widely in the NCR and nearby and economic shutdown is not on the agenda, to get back control the main focus should now be on more widespread testing and improving tracing. A calculation on the most recent testing data from the DOH published on Facebook gives an estimate of the positivity rate from over 20k tests in a day at about 18%. Allowing for the questionable reliability of data here it is certainly too high. Compare with Georgia at 11% and Arizona 12.3%. Both these US states have been making sad headlines lately.

In Texas. the latest positivity rate is a very high 24%. This month that state administered about 35k tests a day on average. In late July it averaged about 64k a day. Why it fell the state health people are not sure, though some testing facilities were closed early in August. But they now have an outbreak more than double the Philippine's so their state government is very worried about the lower testing given the high positivity rate.

An outbreak is considered under control by the WHO if the positivity rate is 5% or under for 14 days. The Philippine's DOH claimed a nationwide rate of 10% in early May.

Raffin

https://rappler.com/nation/coronavir...august-15-2020

At this rate the number of cases looks likely to be well over 200k by the end of this month.

Deaths, while not being at the levels seen earlier in the year, are not showing the improvement they should, due to there being better treatments available, compared to March and April. Yesterday again a very large number,159, were reported. Just under half of these are explained in this final section of the latest DOH bulletin notes on Facebook:

"....Moreover, there were seventy-one (71) cases that were previously reported as recovered but after final validation, they were deaths (70) and active (1) cases. One (1) case previously reported as a death has been validated to be a recovery"...

Looking at the regional distribution data given it seems most of these "recovery deaths" were from Central Visayas.

I have now found a more detailed DOH report on results from the 20k -30k daily test samples. Beat COVID -19 Situationer can be found on Facebook. It gives the positivity data, which the DOH are obviously not keen to publicize in their more accessible reports:

In the past week the Nationwide daily positivity rate has been between 12.6% and 14.2% For the period Aug 2 - 8 it averaged 12.6% Nationwide....but 17.3% for tests done in NCR labs.
The nationwide R (effective reproduction number) is estimated at 1.3. Ideally should be 1.0 or less to control spread.

The averages for Aug 9 - 16 not yet published. When they are it will be interesting to see any effect from the 2 week reversion of the NCR to MECQ.

So a poor picture Nationwide and especially in the NCR and Visayas.

The Philippines outbreak has similar recent positivity rates to Arkansas (11.7) and Kansas (12.2). Both these states are now experiencing surges as they did not always have state wide restrictions and opened up too early. The NCR figure is comparable with Florida's in early July at around 15%, when it was being talked of as being a world virus epicenter. It's positivity rate has now declined to around 10% but the lagged effect on deaths is noticeable, with daily records being set.

This news item about the virus in Florida has graphs which illustrate all this well:

https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/he...1-85672b779732