General Santos City records 2 cases of Omicron variant infection

GENERAL SANTOS CITY — The city government alerted residents here Saturday over the local transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant.

This, as the local government reported before noon the detection of two local cases of the highly contagious strain, which it believes has fueled the surge of COVID-19 infections in the area in the last three weeks.

The first patient is a 26-year-old female who was admitted to a private hospital here last Jan. 2 “due to labor pains associated with a leaking bag of water” and later found infected with COVID-19 in reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction test.

Samples from the patient, who was discharged on Jan. 5, met the criteria for genome sequencing and were confirmed as B.1.1.529 or Omicron variant based on results released this week by the University of the Philippines-Philippine Genome Center.

The second patient is a 62-year-old male who also tested positive for COVID-19 after undergoing consultation in a private hospital early this month due to cough and was managed through home isolation.

One of the four identified close contacts of the first patient came out positive for the disease while four were infected out of the seven persons exposed to the second patient.

Both patients and the infected close contacts were already tagged recovered and currently in stable condition.

“There is no history of travel for both patients which would lead us to assume that both are cases of local transmission,” the local government said in a statement.

The city recorded a total of 1,005 active COVID-19 cases as of 6 p.m. Friday, breaching the 1,000-mark in just three weeks after only posting 31 last Jan. 5.