HEALTH authorities have sent to genome laboratories the samples of six travelers from India—or connecting passengers from other countries who transited at Indian airports—and then tested positive for Covid-19 on arrival in Manila. This, amid rising anxiety about how long the Philippines can keep out the so-called Indian variant blamed for the surge in infections and deaths in that South Asian country.
The samples from the six passengers were sent to the University of the Philippines- Philippine Genome Center (UP-PGC) for sequencing to detect if they are positive of the B1617 variant, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said on Wednesday.
Vergeire also said a total of 117 travelers were quarantined, prior to the implementation of the travel ban on passengers from India, she said.
“As to these travelers from India that were quarantined upon arrival here—before the restrictions were imposed—110 of them were tested already and six turned out positive,” Vergeire said, partly in Filipino.
She also disclosed that six other travelers “are still being located.”
Vergeire stressed that the hope of the government is for the B1617 variant and other “specific variant” not to enter the country.
“That was also our objective before, when we imposed travel restrictions for the UK variant not to enter the country,” Vergeire added.
Vergeire stressed that “still the best defense to strictly observe the minimum public health standards.”
She thus urged people to “continue doing the public minimum health standards because that will protect you from these variants.”
Earlier, the Department of Health (DOH) said that based on the latest whole-genome sequencing report, the DOH, UP-PGC, and the UP-National Institutes of Health (UP-NIH) revealed the detection of additional 289 B117 variant cases, 380 B1351 variant cases, and nine P3 variant cases from the 744 samples sequenced last week.
To date, UP-PGC has already sequenced a total of 7,167 samples, of which 5,917 were assigned lineages.
No B1617, or the Indian variant, was detected yet.
Covid cases
AS of 4 p.m. of May 5, the DOH logged 5,685 additional Covid-19 cases, bringing the total number of infections in the country to 1,073,555.
There were 8,961 recoveries and 178 deaths.
Of the total number of cases, 5.8 percent (62,713) are active, 92.5 percent (993,042) have recovered, and 1.66 percent (17,800) have died.
Moreover, 112 cases previously tagged as recoveries were reclassified as deaths after final validation.
All laboratories were operational on May 3, 2021 while five laboratories were not able to submit their data to the Covid-19 Document Repository System.