 Welcome to the Stop COVID-Dets webinar series brought to you by the University of the Philippines. The Stop COVID-Dets shorts make it easier for you to go to the presentations that you are interested in. I'm Dr. Raymond Sarmiento, Director of the National Telehealth Center. And I'm Dr. Susy Pineda Mercado, Adjunct Faculty of the National Telehealth Center. Together, let's stop COVID-Dets. Good afternoon to all the people in the audience. I will be providing updates on the variants in the country. In the Philippines, as of July 16, 10.30 a.m., why the time stamp? Because it changed by 10.31 a.m. this morning. We had our media presser and I'm going to present that data. Out of the 7,878 sequence as of July 16, 10.30, the beta variant accounts for 23.35 percent, the alpha 20.52 percent, gamma has remained accounting for only two cases, and the delta variant was 19, which came from incoming international travelers. On the right most is the theta variant, which is a variant of interest, not a variant of concern. This was the P.3, first detected in the Philippines, and we had recorded 166 cases. However, as of 10.31, July 16, 2021, we added data from 679 samples, sequence for a total now of 8,557. We now report 16 new cases of delta variant, and that total is 35 cases already detected in the country from the original 19. An additional five cases are from incoming international travelers, and 11 cases are local cases. The local cases are from the following regions, two from the national capital region, one from region three, two from region six, six from region 10, for a total of 11 cases, and the five are from returning overseas Filipinos. For the five returning overseas, two cases have traveled history from UAE and Qatar, one from the UK, and two ROFs are still being verified as this news is really very fresh. Our whole nation approach to the pandemic includes the four door strategy. You can see here in this slide, door one is preventing ROFs or foreign nationals also from leaving the country of origin. So door one involves travel restrictions as initial response to new variants of concerns and variants of interest. For door two, this is preventing the entry or containing and mitigating cases, and the safeguards for when to ease door one due to economic cost are considered. So here we have your screening, quarantine, and testing at ports of entry. Door three is preventing further local spread and this involves strengthening our PDITR strategies, prevent, detect, isolate, treat, reintegrate, plus vaccination. And door four is containing a widespread and overwhelmed health system by putting in strong health and critical capacity and systems, putting in versus a stronger health and critical capacity systems versus a surge to ensure proper and timely COVID-19 management and continuity of essential services. Now before today, before 1030, we strengthened door two and that's because we wanted to prepare our systems for the following. Delta VOC detected locally. This has now happened. Increasing cases and clusters observed. Sharp spikes signaling faster transmission, swiftly increasing admissions, especially at the ICU. We shall continue to strengthen door two for the scenarios of two, three, and four because scenario one is already present in the country. The PDITR strategies plus vaccination. You've heard this many times. This is part of our whole-of-nation approach which is preventing. And these are individual as well as community participation is much needed in the prevention. We have detection which has wherein the big role is from our local government units including our isolation, so detection and isolation. And then now we have treatment which is spearheaded by the one hospital command and reintegration by being practicing again the minimum health public standards and awareness for possible infection, social healing, economic recovery, and of course the plus is the vaccination which allows population protection and herd immunity, sustainable immunization program and self-sufficiency. Due to ongoing high rates of transmission around the world, all variants are expected to continue to evolve over time and we've heard that from our speakers, to previous speakers. It has been repeatedly observed over the course of the pandemic that variants acquire the same or similar amino acid substitutions that may offer a competitive advantage. Likewise, the understanding of the impact of these variants are expected to evolve. Information updates reflect these as new evidence becomes available. As shared by Dr. Pawsan, we need to keep on calibrating and making changes or adjustments on our policies, public health measures, and strategies. Because of this, the WHO periodically reviews and adjusts working definitions. These are the revised set of definitions for variants of concern, variants of interest, and in addition, these revised definitions formalize a third category label, alerts for further monitoring which includes variants with indications that they may pose a risk to global public health depending on the evolving pandemic, but for which evidence of phenotypic or epidemiological impact are less clear when compared to variants of concerns or variants of interest. These alerts are reassessed regularly. A previously designated variant of interest or variant of concern which has conclusively demonstrated to no longer pose a major added risk to global public health compared to other circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants can be reclassified. These are the four variants of concern which has remained. You still have your alpha, your beta, gamma, and of course the most feared now, the delta. BOCs plus, you've heard this a number of weeks back, especially for the delta plus variant. These are BOCs with additional amino acid changes. These comprise a small fraction of the total number of sequence cases. There's also still limited direct evidence of further phenotypic impact. There is now a shorter list of variants of interest and notably, please, theta or p.3, the variant of interest first identified in the Philippines and reported in March has been taken out of the list and reclassified as alerts for further monitoring. This is the other piece of news apart from the new delta cases reported which I wish to share with you which happened also just recently. This slide shows eight of the 12 in this category including the p.3 here which the WHO has now reclassified as an alert for further monitoring. The WHO emphasized that the assessment considers primarily global risks and national authorities may actually choose to continue to designate this as variants of local interest or variants of local concern. Just where you are recall, the p.3 carries mutations with suspected and or established phenotypic impact such as potential suggestive of increased resistance to neutralizing antibodies and therefore becoming more transmissible However it has been reclassified as alerts for monitoring along with epsilon and zeta because the reported detection has decreased over. A total of 269 sequences were uploaded to GSAID from 14 countries as of July 6, 2021. As of this last sequencing which we reported just today we have 44 more cases. 71% of these 269 sequences were reported from the Philippines mostly from the Central Visayas region and only sporadic detections or small cluster of cases have been reported globally. So the key messages are as follows, local cases of the Delta variant have been detected as of today. We all need to do our part in preventing local spread. Strengthening of the PDITR plus vaccination has been put in place by our government and the last one is that P.3 has been reclassified under the category of alert for further monitoring. That's all Raymond and thank you very much for your attention. We hope that you learned as much as we did from that excellent presentation. We also hope that you will join us every Friday from 12 noon to 2pm Manila time on Zoom, Facebook, or YouTube. So stay safe, stay connected, and see you online.