02479: Numbers Update for July

Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 109

It's a new month and the start of the latest extension of our current level of quarantine - for those who missed the late, late, late show, Metro Manila is still under General Community Quarantine (GCQ). That means we've been in a slightly more relaxed state of quarantine for over a month now and the numbers...don't look great.

The chart above is my personal tracker for Taguig City cases with the blue bar showing the number of active cases in the LGU as of 30 June. The orange line tracks the number of new cases reported today with a supporting trendline to show how things are. And do note, that's a 4th-degree polynomial trendline that should allow for more peaks and valleys but instead, it looks like a steady exponential rise that really picks up in June.

When we look at the total reported cases in the Philippines with a similar trendline, you see the same general shape to the trendline with a similar spike come late June.

When we play around with DOH's silly little "fresh" versus "late" cases reporting style for PH COVID-19 cases we see a similar rise in the trendline of fresh cases come the end of June. 

So...we have a long way to go, to say the least.

You know what doesn't help? These stupid 2-week quarantine declarations that are announced at the last minute. That just stresses that the government is really just fighting a delaying action without an actual plan. Supposedly we have a testing capacity of over 30,000 but then our average daily testing numbers are a lot lower so we don't even have a firm grasp of how bad the problem is. 

What we have are a lot of punitive actions and police actions and heaps and heaps of government bureaucracy complicating everything from distributing aid, managing safety for businesses that are trying to re-open because they need to survive, and almost daily examples of government inefficiency over and over and over again.

I'd like to be able to celebrate my birthday outside of the safety of the Sietch, but the current progression is not at all reassuring.