Oriental Mindoro has over 10,000 persons under monitoring, 62 PUIs

From the Facebook account of Gov. Humerlito Dolor

MANILA, Philippines – Oriental Mindoro now has at least 10,615 persons under monitoring (PUMs) and another 62 patients under investigation (PUIs), the provincial government admitted on Monday.

According to a Facebook post from Gov. Humerlito Dolor, the data was accumulated through coordination with the Department of Health (DOH) office in Mimaropa.

In the graph shown by Dolor, it appears that the concentration of PUMs is in Calapan City, the provincial capital, with 1,540 PUMs. On the other hand, 20 of the PUIs are in Mansalay town.

“After the final gathering of data from different towns and cities in Oriental Mindoro, including coordination with DOH Mimaropa, this is the correct data, as of the recent tally, ” Dolor said in Filipino. “You can expect the provincial government to update the COVID-19 tracker daily.”

The Department of Health (DOH) describes PUMs as those with travel history to COVID-19 affected countries, or those who were possibly exposed to COVID-19 patients and those who are yet to be tested or confirmed.

PUIs are patients who have exhibited signs and symptoms of COVID-19 and who had exposure to the current coronavirus strain.

As of now, Dolor said that there were no confirmed COVID-19 patients in the province, although three PUIs had already died while waiting for the test results — one of them testing negative.

No results from the 13 pending tests have been released by the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) in Muntinlupa.

“Specimens have been taken from all of the severe PUIs admitted to the hospital or provincial isolation areas, and they are just awaiting results.  One has already tested negative before,” Dolor said.

“The three deaths recorded came from PUIs who are awaiting the results,” he added. “All of them were laid to rest in accordance with strict health protocols that the government placed while waiting for the results.”

As of Monday, the whole of Luzon was still under an enhanced community quarantine due to the rising number of COVID-19 cases.  This means that only frontline service operators like healthcare workers and service crew members are allowed to go to work.

According to the Department of Health, as of this writing, there are already 462 confirmed cases in the Philippines, 33 of whom have already died and 18 have recovered.

Worldwide, over 334,000 COVID-19 cases have been recorded, of whom 14,608 have died and 96,243 patients have recovered.

READ: Luzon now under ‘enhanced community quarantine’ – Palace

READ: BREAKING: DOH: 462 people now infected with COVID-19 in PH

COVID-19 is a respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus that first emerged in Wuhan City in Hubei province in China in late 2019.

The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses named the novel coronavirus as SARS-CoV-2.

Coronavirus is a family of viruses with surfaces having a crown-like appearance. The viruses are named for the spikes on their surfaces.

/atm