LUCENA CITY – The head of the provincial government-run Quezon Medical Center here maintained that the woman from Lucban town who gave birth at the hospital and later tested positive for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-29) did not contract the illness from their medical facility.
“It is wrong to say that she got the COVID-19 at the QMC. Our suspicion (was that) she was one of the virus carriers at the hospital,” Dr. Rolando Padre, director of QMC, told the Inquirer.
Padre said the 39-year-old patient was one of the “asymptomatic carriers or with no symptoms referable to COVID-19” who passed the triaging procedures before her formal admission.
Padre said the patient underwent the reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) laboratory test on the second day after her admission.
“It is unlikely that she got infected right after admission,” he insisted, even as he admitted that, based on studies, there could still be a “slim chance” that she contracted the virus despite the short period.
Still, Padre maintained that “the chance is low because she is still in the incubation period”.
“Recommendation to swab timing is fifth day from the onset for a higher chance of positive result if there is really a virus,” the QMC head explained.
The patient remains in isolation at the QMC.
Earlier, Dr. Belen Garana, head of QMC – Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology (OB-GYN) announced the rise in COVID-19 cases among its pregnant patients during the past two weeks in a memorandum issued on Thursday, August 27.
This prompted the hospital management to place the OB-GYN ward under “total lockdown” starting August 31 until September 14.
Two of the OB-GYN doctors were also infected while three more together with other staff have also been exposed to the virus.
On Friday, Lucban Mayor Celso Olivier Dator said on Facebook that the locality’s COVID-19 Patient No. 16 had a normal delivery at the QMC on August 25.