Baguio City Covid UK variant cases now 11

CITY HALL BEAT
Aileen P. Refuerzo

BAGUIO CITY -- Known cases of B.1.1.7 or UK variant of Covid-19 hiked from two to 11 with the addition of nine new ones in this summer capital as reported by the Philippine Genome Center and Dept. of Health.
    City Health Officer Dr. Rowena Galpo said all of the cases had already recovered from the disease.
    Of the nine new cases, seven were females aged 22 (two of them), 24, 26, 30, 51 and 64 and two males aged 19 and 23.
    The city’s first UK variant case was a 30-year old female reported while the second was a two-year toddler also a female.  Both were reported last March.
    Galpo said most of the cases were part of the Covid-19 case clusters being monitored by the city including the business process outsourcing, English as a second language (ESL), health workers and a household cluster.
    She said efforts were exerted to break the transmission by back tracking the patients’ contacts from F1 to F3 and retesting.
    As what was done in the previous two cases, data and link analyses are being done to trace the movement of the patients, the places they went to identify the people they interacted with at the time she was infectious for monitoring and reassessment for possible infection. 
    Mayor Benjamin Magalong said that with the current rate of inspection in the city, it cannot be discounted that more cases of the UK and other variants are now in the city which just cannot be captured in actual time because of the time required for the PGC to process the specimens.
    “Medyo delayed ang results but it appears that we now have all the variants at the rate our infection is increasing.  So mag-ingat po tayong lahat,” said the mayor who himself had caught and is currently recovering from the virus.  
He urged anew the public to strictly adhere to the minimum public health standards to protect themselves against it.
   ***
Another community testing for sectors at risk of Covid conducted
    Workers from the susceptible sectors submitted themselves to Covid-19 testing offered for free under the Aggressive     Community Testing (ACT) program of the city government and the Bases Conversion Development Authority (BCDA)-John Hay Management Corp.
    The three-day activity held April 15-17 at the Melvin Jones targeted 3,000 persons or 1,000 per day on first-come-first-served basis.
    A total of 913 persons availed for the swab test last April 15.
    Mayor Benjamin Magalong, an advocate of expanded or targeted testing, said aggressive testing should be sustained hand in hand with the other infection control and case management systems established in the city like contact tracing, quarantine and isolation, treatment and prevention to prevent the city's Covid-19 situation from getting out of hand.  
    "Although testing will cause the number of our cases to balloon, we will be able to determine where the infections are coming from and know the situation on the ground.  
    "Because we know our true situation, we will also know how to address the situation, manage the cases and prevent more transmissions," he said.
    Dr. Galpo said they project a 10 percent positivity rate during the activity or around 300 new cases which can further increase after contact tracing.
    She said the city is preparing for these additional cases by increasing the bed capacity of the city's isolation facilities.  
The city is also working out means to help public and private hospitals expand their capacities.
    The ACT activity is the latest of the several rounds conducted in the city through the help of the BCDA-JHMC.
    This time, the targeted sectors include the construction workers, call center agents/business process outsourcing, food handlers, grocery store workers, bank employees, security guards, uniformed personnel, employees of regional line agencies and city employees of regional line agencies and city government employees.