25 Maguindanao town cops on quarantine after testing positive for COVID-19

COTABATO CITY –– All employees of a police station in Maguindanao have been relieved from their duties to undergo mandatory quarantine after they tested positive for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), police and health officials said.

Brig. Gen. Samuel Rodriguez, regional police director for the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region (BARMM), said he had deployed 25 police officers to Pagalungan police station after 25 of the station’s organic police force contracted COVID-19.

One of the Pagalungan police officers started having fever and body pains days after he attended the Jan. 17 fiesta celebration of the Santo Nino in the nearby Midsayap town of Cotabato province.

He kept on reporting for duty until his test results, which came out on Monday, Jan. 25, confirmed his COVID-19 infection.

This prompted the rest of the officers to have their swabs taken for real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) testing to detect the virus. When the results came out Wednesday, all 24 of the police personnel at the station tested positive for SARS-CoV 2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

The officer whose name Rodriguez did not divulge said he believed he got the virus from the Midsayap town fiesta.

Rodriguez said the 25 officers that they deployed from BARMM would ensure that the town police station would continue to function even as its personnel are on quarantine.

Dr. Elizabeth Samama, Maguindanao health chief, said they had deployed health frontliners to Pagalungan to help the town’s health office to attend to the needs of the ailing policemen.

Samama has ordered the contact tracing of people who had close contact with all the Pagalugnan police officers, starting from their respective families.

LZB