BY ADRIAN P. NEMES III
Mayor Evelio Leonardia appealed yesterday to all Bacolodnons to remain vigilant by continuing to observe minimum health protocols.
“I am renewing this appeal as Bacolod City received confirmation from the Department of Health that two new Delta variant positives were reported in Barangay Mansilingan by the Philippine Genome Center,” Leonardia said.
This brings to four the total Delta variant cases in Bacolod, he added.
The third Delta variant positive is a 3-year-old male, who was swabbed on July 15. He was asymptomatic, based on his Case Investigation Form, a press release from the city said.
The fourth case is a 63-year-old female resident, also of Mansilingan. She was swabbed on July 23 and was symptomatic.
Her CIF showed that she was fully vaccinated with Sinovac, the press release added.
‘ACTION AGAD’
“Upon receiving the report yesterday, I immediately ordered local containment measures/surgical lockdown of the affected residential areas. There is no cause for alarm as both patients have already recovered,” Leonardia said.
The minor has already been released from the mandatory 10-day quarantine, while the 63-year-old underwent a 14-day isolation and had also been cleared.
“Rest assured that your city government, through our Emergency Operations Center, headed by City Administrator Em Legaspi-Ang, and the medical team, are on top of the situation,” Leonardia said.
Apart from the surgical lockdown and ongoing contact-tracing measures, the EOC also conducted repeat swabbing of the two, including their close contacts up to third generation.
Ang said the boy was swabbed after his father, who works as a security guard of a bank, tested positive for Covid.
The woman, meanwhile, was an earlier close contact of a Covid-19 patient.
On Thursday, a 71-year-old businessman from Banago and a 32-year-old pregnant woman from Sum-ag also tested positive of the Delta variant, based on the genome sequencing conducted on the samples extracted from them.
5 THETA CASES
The specimens of the four Delta variant positive patients were among the 166 collected from July 9 to August 9 and were submitted by the molecular laboratories to the Philippine Genome Center, Ang said.
She added that Bacolod also has five confirmed cases of the Theta variant that was first detected in the central part of the Philippines and is said to be also contagious.
She said there is no need to panic as everything is under control.
In fact, the Covid cases in Bacolod were on a downward trend, apparently showing that the virus has been contained, Ang added.
The Covid positivity rate also further dropped to 17.02 percent from August 7-13, the City Epidemiology and Surveillance Unit reported.
The recovery rate dropped to 92.9, as of Sunday, as 14,818 of the 15,951 confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic have beaten the disease, while 370 have died, representing 2.3 percent of the total number of cases, EOC records showed.
Bacolod and Negros Occidental were recently classified as low risk areas for Covid-19 by the DOH in Region 6.*
