Disease Surveillance Metrics and Statistics

Abstract

Alongside surveillance, policies and corresponding implementation guidelines are crucial in managing the spread of COVID-19. For each stage of the pandemic, government agencies overseeing health, economic, social, and security aspects need to formulate, implement, and enforce policies to ensure that risk levels are monitored and corresponding impact is addressed. In the Philippines, the LGU Epidemic Response Framework has been used for classifying the epidemic risk of provinces, highly urbanized cities (HUC), and independent component cities (ICC). For the first stage of the pandemic, the decision matrix uses the Case Doubling Time (CDT) along with the Critical Care Utilization Rate (CCUR) to identify the appropriate community quarantine (CQ) guidelines that should be implemented in a locality. CDT measures the number of days in which the cases will double. A lower CDT means a higher speed of transmission of the disease. CCUR measures the intensive care unit beds and mechanical ventilator utilization of all hospitals in the region where the locality is included. Other secondary measures such as security risks and socioeconomic factors are also used to escalate or de-escalate imposed CQ guidelines. For the second stage of the pandemic, the primary metrics that were used are the average daily attack rate (ADAR) and two-week growth rate (2WGR).