The More You Know: COVID-19

 Philippines, one of the high-risk countries from the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, recorded the first death outside China. The government has announced lock-down of Metro Manila, followed by the entire Luzon island and is mulling over more localised lock-downs. The Philippines government declared a state of calamity in the country for six months on 17 March.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a new strain of coronavirus. This new virus and disease were unknown before the outbreak began in Wuhan, China, in December 2019.

On 30 January 2020, the Philippine Department of Health reported the first case of COVID-19 in the country with a 38-year-old female Chinese national. On 7 March, the first local transmission of COVID-19 was confirmed. WHO is working closely with the Department of Health in responding to the COVID-19 outbreak. 

The ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a novel infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), spread to the Philippines on January 30, 2020, when the first case of the disease was confirmed in Metro Manila. It involved a 38-year-old Chinese woman who was confined in the San Lazaro Hospital in Manila. The second case was confirmed on February 2, that of a 44-year-old Chinese man who died a day earlier, which was also the first confirmed death from the disease outside mainland China.[1][2][3] The first case of someone without travel history abroad was confirmed on March 5, a 62-year-old male who frequented a Muslim prayer hall in San Juan, Metro Manila, raising suspicions that a community transmission of COVID-19 is already underway in the Philippines. The man's wife was confirmed to have contracted COVID-19 on March 7, which was also the first local transmission to be confirmed.

However, several schools have opted to make up for lost time with online classes, following a CHED advisory that encourages schools to use “available distance learning, e-learning, and other alternative modes of delivery in lieu of residential learning if they have the resources to do so.”