Hannah Ebeo, health education and promotion officer of South Cotabato Integrated Provincial Health Office (Screengrab of live-streamed press conference)
GENERAL SANTOS CITY – Health authorities in South Cotabato reported on Wednesday the province’s first local case of the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) involving a recovered patient infected with the Beta or South African variant.
Hannah Ebeo, health education and promotion officer of the Integrated Provincial Health Office (IPHO), said the patient is a 29-year-old female from Tantangan town who had a history of travel to Davao City.
She said the case was confirmed on Tuesday by the Department of Health-Region 12 through the genome sequencing result released by the University of the Philippines-Philippine Genome Center (UP-PGC).
Ebeo said the patient reportedly traveled to Davao City last July 2 and underwent reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) testing on July 10 as a walk-in client of the Davao One World Diagnostic Center.
The patient tested positive for Covid-19 based on the test result released on July 13 and was reported by UP-PGC as a Beta variant case on Aug. 9, she said.
“She was asymptomatic and already considered recovered based on the DOH algorithm for the tagging of recoveries,” Ebeo said in a press conference in Koronadal City.
She said the patient’s close contacts were properly traced by the Tantangan rural health unit and none are so far listed as infected.
The variant case is the fifth recorded in the province’s 10 towns and the first for the Beta variant.
DOH-12 earlier reported in April two cases of the Alpha or the United Kingdom, and one each for Gamma or Brazilian, and P.3 or the variant first detected in the country, all involving returning overseas Filipino workers.
Ebeo said they sent 20 specimens to the UP-PGC in May and June but none of them came out positive for any variant.
For July, she said they endorsed 10 more samples for genome sequencing through the DOH-12 and the results are still pending.
With the confirmation of the area’s first local variant case, she urged travelers and returning residents to undergo quarantine and isolation to protect their families and communities.
As of Tuesday night, the IPHO recorded a total of 759 active cases in the province, with 143 patients admitted in various hospitals and 616 undergoing isolation.
The confirmed infections in the area since last year reached a total of 9,631, with 286 related deaths and 8,586 recoveries. (PNA)
