MANILA: The Philippine government has extended the lockdown orders by another week Monday. The country is facing an alarming spike in coronavirus infections. The patients have started to overwhelm many hospitals in the capital and outlying regions.

Philippine's President Rodrigo Duterte has issued lockdown orders last week as daily infections breached 10,000. Roman Catholic leaders shifted Holy Week and Easter events online after all public gatherings, including in places of worship, were temporarily banned. The government-run Lung Centre of the Philippines became the latest hospital in the capital region to announce no walk-in patients allowed after its wards for corona reached full capacity and its emergency room was handling twice its capacity. The strictest restriction on movement is intended to control a new surge in infections that has overwhelmed hospitals and been traced mainly to increased public mobility and new COVID variants. Also, other hospitals said they could expand bed capacity but lacked enough medical workers partly because many had been infected with the novel coronavirus.  

According to the reports, more than 795,000 corona cases with 13,425 deaths have been recorded the highest totals in Southeast Asia after Indonesia. However, the country which implemented one of the world’s longest lockdowns last year, suffered its worst-ever recession in 2020. 

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