BY ADRIAN P. NEMES III
“We should be alarmed and more cautious,” Dr. Ronel Sario, president of the Philippine College of Physicians-Negros Occidental, said yesterday.
This was after the Philippine Genome Center confirmed that two residents of Bacolod City tested positive of the Delta variant of Covid-19, based on the genome sequencing conducted on the specimens submitted by the city molecular laboratories.
Sario, who is a pulmonary specialist, said the Delta variant is more contagious than the original strain of the virus.
Quoting a report from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Sario said the Delta is nearly twice as contagious as previous variants.
He said the Delta variant seems to produce the similar high amount of virus in both unvaccinated and fully vaccinated people.
He said, however, that like other variants, the amount of virus produced by Delta breakthrough infections in fully vaccinated people also goes down faster than infections in unvaccinated people, which means that fully vaccinated people are likely to be infectious for less time than unvaccinated people.
Dr. Rosalie Deocampo, head of the Contact Tracing team, said earlier that vaccination helped in lowering the Covid cases in Bacolod, adding that those who died had not been vaccinated.*
