“It is really a numbers game. The pandemic is really a war on logistics,” Lim said in a Stop COVID Deaths online seminar hosted by the University of the Philippines (UP).
For context, last Sept. 16, the country had 21,261 new cases of COVID 19. This brought the total confirmed cases to 2,304,192 with 177,946 active cases, 2,090,228 recoveries, and 36,018 deaths.
The Philippine Genome Center will focus its efforts in the detection of COVID-19 variants in the country, with the scaling down of its testing operations for COVID-19 and expansion of genomic sequencing capacities in PGC Visayas and PGC Mindanao.
UP health experts weigh in on how vaccine hesitancy contributes to the mutation and formation of variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The UP Surgical Innovation and Biotechnology Laboratory (UP SIBOL) is composed of engineers from the state university’s Diliman campus and clinicians from its Manila campus, who have come together to develop Filipino-made health devices.
Three research projects for the study of SARS-CoV-2 and disease outbreaks that are being undertaken by UP Mindanao and UP Diliman are utilizing the DOST Advanced Science and Technology Institute’s Computing and Archiving Research Environment (COARE) Supercomputing Facility.
The UP Pandemic Response Team assesses how the gaps in COVID-19 data reporting affect policymaking and interpretation of the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines.
A university-based pandemic monitor pointed out a huge gap in the COVID-19 data that was too hard to ignore as it could result in misplaced policies and misinterpretation of the severity of the situation.
As medical doctors underscore the disconnect in the situation on the ground, data analytics from the University of the Philippines (UP) Pandemic Response Team (PRT) touch on the gap and delays between laboratory test results and the data published by the Department of Health (DOH).
Health advocate Dr. Gene Nisperos of Community Medicine Development Foundation said this could be a reason “we are losing the pandemic fight. We’ve fallen behind the enemy.”
The Philippine Genome Center (PGC) Visayas received P92.6 million from the Department of Budget and Management to enhance its biosurveillance through timely whole genome sequencing (WGS) of clinical samples.
WGS is vital to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) response of the government. It can be used to detect new variants, if the variants are causing the spike in cases in certain areas, and if there are already local transmissions of the variants.
THE University of the Philippines-Philippine Genome Center (UP-PGC) satellite facility in UP-Mindanao (UP-Min) is expected to conduct whole-genome sequencing (WGS) to detect Covid-19 variants before the end of the year.
Dr. Rachel Joy Pasion, DOH-Davao Regional Epidemiology Surveillance Unit head, said in a virtual presser on Tuesday, August 31, 2021, that the UP-Min PGC is targeted to operate by November this year.
Based on their initial meetings, Pasion said the operation of UP-Min PGC is still waiting for funding for the operation of the facility.
The pandemic has affected and changed practically every aspect of our lives. Some may have changed for the better, others ended being worse, and a few had a little of both. Regardless of the type of change we had, we can’t deny that our health has been immensely impacted by the current situation, especially that […]
