Davao City: After confirmatory tests, the Southern Philippines Medical Center (SPMC) has reported a total of 12 frontliners who have tested positive for COVID-19 where 2 are still admitted while 10 have been discharged.
Dr. Leopoldo Vega bared how the frontliners who tested positive were contained and closely monitored by health authorities to prevent the further spread of the said virus.
“The number of employees that we had tested from the frontlines are numbered at 300 and 12 turned out to be positive so that’s about 4.4%…all of them [frontliners] were admitted but as of now 10 have already been discharged,” Dr. Vega said.
In light of the affected health professionals, the exhaustive efforts of the Department of Health Davao Center for Health Development (DOH DCHD) have contacted and traced 2,205 individuals who may be at risk for COVID-19. And the efforts of health authorities have yielded a lull in the number of daily positive cases in Region XI.
“It looks like the condition is controlled in a certain way because the last two weeks we have not seen any kind of surge [COVID-19 cases],” Dr. Vega said.
Now that the frequency of positive cases in Region XI has lowered to a manageable level, there are still numerous challenges that local health authorities are facing. Chief among these is maintaining proper social distancing to battle further community transmission.
“The intervention that we are doing in mitigating the spread of the virus basically is one of physical isolation or physical distancing and social distancing because the virus cannot, let’s say, swim more than six (6) feet in other words if you do have a physical distance, chances of a community kind of infection cannot happen if we do the necessary interventions,” Dr. Vega added. (KPC)
