4 Samar health workers virus positive
TACLOBAN CITY — The Samar Provincial Hospital (SPH) said that four of its health workers are among the Eastern Visayas region’s 44 new cases of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) that the Department of Health (DoH) regional office confirmed on Thursday and Friday last week.
In a statement posted in its social media account, SPH confirmed that the four health workers worked in the hospital and were assigned in the COVID-19 Isolation Unit and SPH Special Care Facility.
“They were already isolated in the quarantine facility of SPH as part of the routinary infection control of the hospital to those staff assigned in the COVID-19 Isolation Unit and the Special Care Facility to undergo a 14-day quarantine and swab RT-PCR Test prior to resumption to duty,” the hospital said in its statement.
The increasing number of health workers getting infected with the dreaded disease is already causing worry among the authorities, who are afraid that it might further enable local transmission if patients are not immediately tested and isolated, as well as overburden health facilities when many of them are placed in isolation or could not report to work.
Next to returning locally stranded individuals and overseas Filipino workers, health workers form the third biggest group of individuals who are found infected with COVID-19 in Eastern Visayas.
In Tacloban City alone, out of the 54 reported cases of COVID-19 infection, 46 of them are health workers in different facilities. Out of this number, 36 are working at Eastern Visayas Regional Medical Center, the apex hospital in the region.
At SPH, the hospital management said that in almost three months that it has been catering to COVID-19 patients, it has been implementing “stringent hospital protocol in handling suspects and confirmed cases.”
“We tried to protect our health workers and support staff but we are left with the fact that we cannot totally eliminate the risk,” the statement read.
The hospital management said it will continue to provide services for non-COVID cases at the SPH main building.