No letup in COVID-19 response – Belmonte

MANILA, Philippines — The Quezon City government yesterday reminded residents to remain vigilant and to continue following health protocols despite the improving COVID-19 situation in the city.

“Despite the good news, we are far from relaxed. While we remain focused on vaccination, our testing centers, isolation facilities and hospitals are still accommodating COVID-19 patients,” Mayor Joy Belmonte said. “As long as we have COVID cases, our services will continue for all affected QCitizens.”

The OCTA Research Group has reported a significant decrease in COVID-19 cases in Quezon City, from an average of 793 to only 506 per day over the past week.

OCTA fellow Guido David said current trends indicate that the daily COVID cases in the city could decrease to 200 by the end of the month.

Belmonte said they expect hospital bed and intensive care unit utilization rates to continue decreasing from the current 69 percent and 73 percent, respectively.

“We anticipate that hospital bed and ICU utilization rates will decrease soon, as cases of COVID-19 continue to plummet,” she said.

Rolando Cruz, who heads the city epidemiology and disease surveillance unit, urged the public to continue following health protocols and immediately report cases of COVID-19 to the local government.

“We encourage our people to continue reporting COVID-19 cases so we can contact trace and isolate contacts of COVID-positive individuals. This will help us mitigate the spread of the virus and bring down the cases further,” Cruz said.

As of yesterday, Quezon City has recorded 173,358 COVID-19 cases, 166,298 recoveries and 1,464 deaths. Only 5,596 are tagged as active cases.

The local government has administered a total of 3,382,373 vaccine doses, including 1.87 million first doses and 1.5 million second doses.

A total of 1,599,643 residents and workers are fully vaccinated in Quezon City, representing some 94.1 percent of the 1.7 million target to achieve population protection.