Delta is still the dominant COVID-19 variant in the Philippines, the Department of Health has clarified, as the coronavirus cases in the country attributed to the more infectious Omicron continued to surge.
During President Rodrigo Duterte’s public address late Tuesday evening, Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said the Omicron variant was the dominant one.
But Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire clarified Wednesday Duque was only referring to the latest genome sequencing which yielded 29 new Omicron cases and 18 new Delta cases.
World Health Organization country representative Dr. Rabindra Abeyasinghe, for his part, said the Omicron variant might soon replace Delta as the dominant variant in the Philippines, noting it would be difficult to determine soon which variant was predominant because of “very few” sequencing results from other regions.
“We believe that in the near future, Omicron will displace Delta variant as the predominant variant as it has done in several other countries,” Abeyasinghe said in a televised public briefing.
“The last batch of samples were largely from NCR (National Capital Region) and from returning overseas Filipinos who tested positive and so it’s not surprising that among the ROFs and also in NCR we are now seeing the Delta variant being displaced by the Omicron variant,” Abeyasinghe added.
Earlier, Philippine Genome Center chief, Dr. Cynthia Saloma said many Delta variant cases were still detected in the sequencing run last December.
“As of now, Delta is still the variant with the highest lineage in our country,” Vergeire said.
Vergeire said 43 percent of the detections in the country were Delta, followed by the Beta variant at 18 percent, and Alpha at 15 percent.
The Omicron variant was at 0.21 percent with a total of 43 cases.
“While the epidemic curve is indicative of the Omicron variant, the Delta variant is still circulating based on our genome sequencing,” Vergeire said.
She said the agency was expecting cases to further increase due to Omicron.
In related developments, the DOH maintained there were no cases of the Deltacron or IHU variants detected in the Philippines.
Dr. Edsel Salvana of the DOH-Technical Advisory Group, however, said Deltacron might be the result of a “laboratory error” while the IHU is neither classified as a variant of concern nor a variant of interest.
Salvana said experts have been studying the IHU since November.