Baguio City’s COVID-19 UK variant cases now at 11

April 17, 2021 Headlines

BAGUIO CITY (April 16, 2021) – Baguio City’s known cases of B.1.1.7 or UK variant of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) hiked from only two to 11 with nine new cases recently reported by the Philippine Genome Center and the Dept. of Health.
Baguio City Health Officer Dr. Rowena Galpo though said all of the cases had already recovered from the disease. Of the nine new cases, seven were females aged 22 (two of them), 24, 26, 30, 51 and 64 and two males aged 19 and 23.
The city’s first UK variant case was a 30-year old female while the second was a two-year toddler, also a female. Both were reported last March. Galpo said most of the cases were part of the COVID-19 case clusters being monitored by the city including the business process outsourcing, English as a second language (ESL), health workers and a household cluster.
She said efforts were exerted to break the transmission by back tracking the patients’ contacts from F1 to F3 and retesting.
As what was done in the previous two cases, data and link analyses are being conducted to trace the movement of the patients, the places they went to identify the people they interacted with at the time she was infectious for monitoring and reassessment for possible infection.
Mayor Benjamin Magalong said that with the current rate of inspection in the city, it cannot be discounted that more cases of the UK and other variants are now in the city which just cannot be captured in actual time because of the time required for the PGC to process the specimens.
“Medyo delayed ang results but it appears that we now have all the variants at the rate our infection is increasing. So mag-ingat po tayong lahat,” Magalong, who himself had caught and is currently recovering from the virus, said.
Artemio A. Dumlao/ABN