Can Poor Contact Tracing be causing PH Covid19 Spikes?
We start with the Co-INFORM risk Maps generated by PSPHP.org. The areas in Red are at the highest risk, while areas in GREEN are at the lower risk levels. Why are these areas harder hit than the rest? What can explain this?
Let us use the Dept of Health’s Data Drop to see if we can find clues to what is causing the spike. The DOH data includes the over 648,000++ covid positive cases. We hope to shed light on the recent spike in PH Covid Cases (7,999) as of today.
We select some of the Regions that were harder hit based on DOH’s own 2 Week Growth Rate measures:
The red lines denote positive cases that were NOT quarantined. The green lines denote positive cases that WERE quarantined. The X-axis show the trend over time. The percent label shows the percent of cases versus the Total (648,000++).
Notice these harder hit regions mostly have LARGER REDs than the GREENs. This means that a lot of positive cases are NOT being quarantined!!!@!!!
We also attach annotations beside each hard hit region. These are the 2 weeks Growth Rate (Active Cases) for each of the region. So NCR has 140.2% change (increased), Region III has 55.7% increase and so on.
Now, let’s contrast that with the lower risk areas. Notice that for the most of these Regions, more positive cases in these Regions were quarantined. The GREEN lines in these regions are higher/larger than the RED lines.
The 2 weeks growth rate for these regions are as follows:
BARMM, -18.4% (decrease)
CARAGA, -21.2% (decrease)
Region 4B, 0% no change
Region VI, -0.7% (decrease)
Region VIII, -28.3% (decrease
It is logical that in a pandemic, the more cases an LGU fails to isolate will circulate in the community. This drives further spread of infections. So Regions that fail to isolate positive cases (within the infectious window), go on to infect more cases. Thus this failure to isolate contributes to the further spike in cases.
But why would LGUs fail to quarantine close contacts of positive cases? When we dig further and ask why, in my opinion is due to lack of effective contact tracing. If the LGUs are not able to quickly identify, they will not be able to isolate the close contacts of infected patients.
This might then explain the reason why these cases show up in DOH’s Data Drop as Quarantine= “No”. I hope this makes sense to readers? If not, I hope you can join our discussion and help us learn from this more.