Baguio Covid - 19 positive patients go public
MORE Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) patients responded to Mayor Benjamin Magalong's call to save lives by revealing their identities to facilitate better contact tracing.
Spouses Enrique and Jaysay Bactad, both 67, residents of Las Piñas City agreed to disclose their circumstances a day after Joel Junsay, a a health worker from the City Health Services Office who is the city's first case of local transmission, doffed his privacy to be of help in containing the spread of the virus.
The couple were both experiencing low-grade fever when they went up to Baguio last March 15 for Enrique's regular check-up with his doctor here. Jaysay started to have fever since March 11.
They stayed in Jaysay's maternal home at Tacay Road in Central Guisad on March 15 and 16 and had a check-up at Notre Dame de Chartres Hospital March 17 where Jaysay had a swab test.
She was later confined at the St Louis University Hospital of the Sacred Heart while Enrique had quarantine at home. He was confined at Notre Dame March 25 due to fever.
All their known contacts in Las Piñas and in Baguio had been put on quarantine protocol.
They shared that in their travel to the city they stopped at Petron in NLEX and briefly at a relative's place in Nancayasan,
Urdaneta.
Their results were received over the weekend.
On Monday, expatriate Rafael Serrano, 59, of Amistad, Camp 7, vacationing in the city who was tested positive for Covid-19 also came out into the open to warn those he may have come in contact with.
Serrano is on vacation from New York, USA and developed Covid symptoms on March 16 after flying in from Bangkok, Thailand on March 12.
He went to several establishments in the city on March 16 and had a family celebration on March 19.
He went for physical therapy at the SLU Hospital of the Sacred Heart on March 20-22 and was admitted at the Baguio General Hospital on March 27.
His results came out March 28, 2020.
The City Epidemiological Surveillance Unit team from the City Health Services Office has rounded up persons he had interacted within those occasions and is encouraging others around him from March 14 to undertake self-quarantine.
Magalong appreciated the "very positive feedback and response from the public when we disclosed the name of Joel Junsay" expressing hope that more patients will follow their examples.
The mayor appealed to the other patients to do the same as their contribution to the city's multi-pronged efforts to contain the contagion.