DOWNTREND. Baguio Mayor Benjamin Magalong relays to the local media on Tuesday (Jan. 25, 2022) the downtrend in Covid-19 cases, citing the city's data. He said they see the cases plateauing this week and dropping significantly by the second week of February. (Screengrab from Baguio PIO video) BAGUIO CITY - The city government here has projected the local coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) situation to plateau this week and expects to see a significant drop in numbers by the second week of February. Mayor Benjamin Magalong, in a media interview on Tuesday, said "if you look at ADAR (average daily attack rate), pababa rin tayo, including yung ating seven-day moving average (it is decreasing, even our seven-day moving average). Ang projection namin (our projection), most probably this week and next week is plateauing and then hopefully, by second week February we will see a downtrend in cases," he said. He said the city maintains its high testing rate and does not disregard the importance of contact tracing. "Our positivity rate is 43 percent and that includes the antigen tests done, not just the RT-PCR (reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction)," he added. Magalong said the antigen test kits being used by the city have a 99 percent accuracy rate and people who turn out positive using it also yield positive results when confirmed through RT-PCR tests. The mayor said the city conducts an average of 1,000 to 1,100 RT-PCR tests and about 600 to 700 antigen tests daily and the positive results are slowly declining. "Testing is directly co-related to the cases and if you do many tests, you will have more cases reason we can capture the carriers here in the city," he added. He also said the city will maintain a high testing rate and continue to isolate and place on quarantine those who test positive for Covid as strategies to control the spread of the virus. The mayor said while the city is hard up in its contact tracing effort, it invests in the conduct of at least the first generation contacts of a positive case. "Although nahirapan tayo sa contact tracing, we are making sure na talagang aggressive na pa rin tayo sa (although we are hard-up with the contact tracing, we are still aggressive in our) contact tracing and it is still a priority," he said. This city saw a big drop in its daily new cases on Sunday and Monday, recording 251 and 384 new cases, respectively, while there were 654 and 690 recoveries on these two days. On January 22, the city recorded 575 new Covid cases and 571 cases on January 21. (PNA) }