New COVID-19 surge in Negros Oriental: 322 new cases in 3 days

Negros Oriental is experiencing a fresh surge of COVID-19 infections, as the province logged more than 300 cases in the last three days.

A total of 322 cases were recorded in this period: 116 on September 8, 82 on September 9, and 124 on September 10, Dr. Liland Estacion, incident commander of the provincial COVID-19 Inter-Agency Task Force, said in a press briefing on Friday, September 10.

The last time the province saw daily triple-digit figures was during the surge in late May to early July 2021.

This now brings the number of active cases in the province to 806, based on figures from the Provincial Health Office.

COVID isolation beds are quickly filling up too. In total, 60% of isolation beds in the province’s hospitals are occupied as of September 10, up from 36% the previous week.

Of the 322 new cases, 61 were recorded in Dumaguete City, the provincial capital. But some rural towns such as Santa Catalina and Tayasan are also seeing a spike in new infections, tallying 23 each in the last three days.

All hospitals in Dumaguete City are now at 60% and above occupancy for COVID isolation beds: Negros Oriental Provincial Hospital at 60%, Silliman University Medical Center at 65%, Holy Child Hospital at 70%, and ACE Dumaguete Doctors Hospital at 75%, as of September 10.

Seven deaths were also recorded in Negros Oriental in the past three days, three of them declared dead on arrival.

Estacion said that they are now considering all new cases as “related” to the more transmissible Delta variant, even if only five patients from Negros Oriental were officially confirmed by the Philippine Genome Center to have contracted the more transmissible COVID-19 variant. The first four reported Delta cases in the province were tagged as “local cases,” since the origin of their infection is unknown.

The province now has 11,931 confirmed COVID cases since the pandemic began, with 242 deaths. As of September 10, 107,687 people have been fully vaccinated in Negros Oriental, or 11.8% of the province’s total target population of 908,939.