Epidemiological characteristics of an outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 in the Philippines

Mark Marcos Alipio; Joseph Dave Mendoza Pregoner

. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. The 144 deaths accounted for as of April 3, 2020, equate to 4.51 case fatality rate. This is relatively lower compared to the case fatality rate of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak 6 in 2002 at 11% and of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) outbreak 7 in 2012 at 36%. However as of April 3, the . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. peer-reviewed) (which was not The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04. 12.20053926 doi: medRxiv preprint Philippine case fatality rate is slightly higher compared to United States of America (2.71%), Germany (1.50%), and even mainland China (4.08%), the countries with the greatest number of cases of Covid-2019. Nevertheless, the country's case fatality rate is obviously lower compared to Spain (9.47%) and Italy (12.33%), among the three countries with the greatest number of cases of Covid-2019. Based on the situational reports of Covid-2019 outbreak in neighboring southeast Asian countries, Cambodia and Vietnam were the only southeast Asian countries with no reported deaths due to the disease. Meanwhile, the case fatality rates of Malaysia (1.64%), Singapore (0.50%), Brunei (0.74%), and Thailand (1.06%) were lower than that of the Philippines; however, Indonesia reported a higher fatality rate at 9.13%. Despite the lower-case fatality rate, Malaysia has slightly higher number of cases at 3,483 than the Philippines.