AN epidemiologist of the Interagency Task Force for Emerging Infectious Diseases’ (IATF-EID) technical working group said on Tuesday that a “flattening of the curve” was observed for the coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19). John Wong, working head of the IATF’s data analytics expert group, said the trend was seen “10 days back” amid the backlog of specimen. “There is, indeed, a flattening of the curve,” said Wong in an online media conference.“We are not just observing how many cases we have in a day, but the speed in which it occur,s” he added. The epidemiologist revealed there were about 8,000 backlogs, and based on the trend, only 10 percent of these tests turned out positive. “Despite of the backlog, the flattening is still in effect … among 8,000, we expect only around 800 of them to be positive, and that won’t really affect the case doubling time as much.”

Source: Manila Times May 05, 2020 03:56 UTC