Bacolod City – The number of travelers from the National Capital Region who arrived at the Bacolod-Silay airport from January 6 to 8 and found to be positive during COVID-19 antigen testing rose to 150, Provincial Incident Management Team head Zeaphard Gerhart Caelian disclosed yesterday.
Gov. Eugenio Jose Lacson ordered the conduct of COVID-19 antigen testing to all arriving passengers at the Bacolod-Silay Airport shortly before his executive order took effect January 9, which requires inbound travelers from Alert Level 3 to submit negative RT-PCR test results before approval of their S-Pass.
Metro Manila is now under Alert Level 3 due to increasing number of COVID-19 cases, which is being blamed on the Omicron variant.
The first 25 passengers whose test results were antigen reactive arrived on five flights on January 6, 77 more from seven flights that arrived January 7 and 48 others on January 8.
They are now being housed at the Silay City quarantine facility, pending RT-PCR testing for further confirmation of their infection.
Those who are unvaccinated will remain at the quarantine facility for 14 days, while vaccinated travelers will stay for seven days, Caelian said, noting that some of the arriving passengers were either partially vaccinated or unvaccinated.
The Department of Health (DOH) yesterday reported 28,707 new Covid-19 infections, the highest single-day tally since the pandemic started in March 2020.
Some 16,803 or 59 percent of new infections were recorded at NCR, increasing the country’s active cases to 128,114, and overall caseload to 2,965,447, DOH said.
Department of the Interior and Local Government Secretary Eduardo Año said the recommendation to place the National Capital Region (NCR) under more stringent Alert Level 4 status will be discussed in the succeeding meetings of the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID).
This, as the OCTA Research Group on Sunday said the positivity rate in Metro Manila has exceeded 50 percent for the first time –50.5 percent as of January 7. (Gilbert Bayoran via The Visayan Daily Star (TVDS), photo courtesy of TVDS)