DOH seeks volunteers to help in contact tracing

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Health (DOH) and the World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday said contact tracing and strict adherence to testing protocols were at the moment key steps to holding back the spread of the coronavirus in the country.

Rabindra Abeyasinghe, WHO country representative, said contact tracing efforts must be beefed up so that those who might have interacted with a confirmed case could be immediately isolated to prevent them from unknowingly transmitting the virus.

Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire on Monday called for volunteers to help the DOH look for people who might have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

She noted that the DOH’s current staff was no longer adequate for this task, given the sheer number of individuals that needed to be traced.

Numbers still rising

The DOH on Tuesday reported 90 more confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country, raising the number to 552. It said 33 patients have died due to the disease and 20 had recovered.

The 19th patient to recover from the disease is a 21-year-old Filipino woman from Davao de Oro province, who recently traveled to the United Kingdom and Qatar. She fell ill on March 3 and tested positive for the virus on March 15, but had since recovered and was discharged on Monday.

The latest to recover is a 76-year-old woman from Quezon City who was exposed to another confirmed case. She showed COVID-19 symptoms on Feb. 25 and tested positive on March 14. She was discharged last Sunday after a test showed she was negative for the virus.

Vergeire said people who had been sickened but whose blood tests and chest X-rays later appeared normal could be discharged.

She said, however, that the person discharged by the hospital still needs to go into a 14-day quarantine and then be tested again at the end of that period for the virus.

It was unclear whether the guideline for releasing patients was due to the limited number of test kits.

Priority

The DOH and the WHO said that in view of the limited supply of test kits to determine infection, priority should be given to people already showing symptoms, such as cough and fever, severely ill patients and those who are elderly and have underlying ailments.

“This information is useful not only to confirm the infection in the people suffering from the disease and to improve their management, but more importantly, this information needs to be used quickly for contact tracing and isolating people at high risk to limit further transmission,” Abeyasinghe said.

He said the disease was transmitted “largely by symptomatic people,” or almost 90 percent of cases, and there was “very weak” evidence that asymp­tomatic people were transmitting SARS-CoV-2.

The DOH earlier said it had 1,300 test kits in stock. Over the weekend, it got an additional 100,000 test kits from China. About 20,000 more were expected from Brunei and South Korea.

Appeal to landlords

Abeyasinghe also allayed concerns of some people who reported they had lost their sense of taste and smell and that that condition was emerging as a common symptom among positive patients.

“These have not yet been confirmed. The focus should be on the key clinical features of this disease, which is largely acute respiratory infection accompanied by fever and sore throat,” he said.

Also on Tuesday, Vergeire reported a disturbing development. She said the DOH had received information that some health workers had been told by their landlords to leave for fear that they might spread the virus in their premises.

She appealed to property owners not to discriminate against health workers and assured them that all front-line workers follow infection and prevention control procedures to prevent the spread of the disease.

“This is not the time to turn our backs on our health care workers. We appeal to our countrymen, let us take care of our health care workers because they are the ones who would look after us should we get sick,” Vergeire said.