THE Philippines is deemed “ready” should the more infectious recombinant variant of COVID-19 dubbed “XE” enter the country as the threat of a new coronavirus mutation looms.
First detected on Jan. 19 in the United Kingdom, the XE is a combination of two sublineages of the Omicron variant—BA.1 and BA.2. It had infected 637 patients there as of March 19, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
WHO has found that XE is 10 times more transmissible than the “stealth” subvariant BA.2, which remains the dominant variant globally and has been blamed for surges in various countries.
“Hopefully, [the XE variant] won’t be epidemiologically and clinically more brutal or more dangerous [than previous variants]. We hope that will not happen, but we are ready,” Health Secretary Francisco Duque III told reporters on Tuesday.
He cited the health system capacity of the country for its readiness in case XE spreads here.
Duque also told the Inquirer that with the 73-percent completion of the 90 million population targeted for vaccination “we may actually see low severe to critical case admissions in the hospitals just as we have seen during the Omicron surge last January.”
Also on Tuesday, the DOH reported that new daily COVID-19 infections remained low in all the island groups.
According to Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire, 2,568 cases, or an average of 366 cases per day, had been recorded from March 29 to April 4.
The positivity rate also slid to 1.8 percent during the same period from 2.1 percent in the previous week, she said.
Data from the COVID-19 tracker on Tuesday showed that Metro Manila recorded the highest number of fresh cases with 1,514 followed by Calabarzon (569), Western Visayas (394), Central Luzon (381) and Central Visayas (323).
With 225 new infections on Tuesday, the country now has 3,679,983 cases since the pandemic started in 2020. . (©Philippine Daily Inquirer 2022/Kathleen de Villa)
