By BIN Staff | 07:24 PM June 05, 2020
A consultant of the provincial government of Bohol on infectious disease said on Friday afternoon that the positive COVID-19 cases in the province is a manifestation that there’s now “community transmission” in the province.
Dr. Ellan Salada, the Infectious disease consultant, defined community transmission as a situation where a person is infected by the virus but they have not been overseas recently or been in recent contact with other confirmed cases.
However, the World Health Organization (WHO) defines community transmission as “countries/areas/territories experiencing larger outbreaks of local transmission defined through as assessment of factors, including but not limited to: large numbers of cases not linkable to transmission chains; large numbers of cases from sentinel lab surveillance; and multiple unrelated clusters in several areas of the country/territory/area”.
Back in March 7, the Department of Health confirmed its first local transmission with the fifth confirmed COVID-19 case in the Philippines who had no history of travel outside of the country at that time.
WHO defines local transmission as “where the source of infection is within the reporting location”.
The wife of the fifth case last March also tested positive of COVID-19 making her the sixth confirmed case in the country.
Contact tracing efforts was done after that as the fifth case last attended a prayer service in a mall in Quezon City.
It was days after that, DOH recommended for placing Metro Manila and Luzon under enhanced community quarantine due to a possible community transmission there.
As of Thursday, June 4, Bohol reported its first two local confirmed positive cases of COVID-19 from an 89-year-old man from Calape town and a 65-year-old woman from Tagbilaran City.
The 89-year-old man was admitted at the hospital on May 25.
He died on May 26 of severe myocardial infarction or heart attack secondary to community-acquired pneumonia.
The 65-year-old woman is still admitted at Ace Medical Center for 10 days due to difficulty of breathing, chest pain and other ailments.
Both have no travel history. They were also not part of the hundreds of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) nor locally stranded individuals who returned home to Bohol.
Contact tracings are being done in Calape and Tagbilaran.
Tagbilaran City Mayor John Geesnell Yap quickly ordered a lockdown on a certain area in Purok 2 in Barangay Dao instead of the entire Purok.
