South Cotabato records first Omicron case
He said all close contacts of the patient were properly tracked and monitored by the rural health unit of Polomolok.[]
“This is already more than a month. The case is now closed and the individual has been tagged as recovered,” he said in a virtual press briefing.
The official said they are continually monitoring the situation in the province and currently waiting for the release of the sequencing results for other probable variant cases, specifically of the highly transmissible Omicron strain.
But citing their assessment, he said the first confirmed Omicron case could not have caused any more infections since the province did not experience a surge last December.
He said the increasing number of new cases in the province in the last two weeks is possibly due to the uncontrolled social gatherings during the Christmas season.
The province’s 10 towns and lone city were placed under Alert Level 2 from late October due to the declining daily new cases but the national Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases upgraded the area’s status to Alert Level 3 effective Jan. 16.
From Jan. 1 to 17, a total of 230 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with 219 listed as active, have been detected in the province, a significant increase from the 121 total infections in December.
John Lemuel Dalisay, IPHO statistician, said they recorded 10 or more cases in the last 14 days and a total of 100 from Jan. 10 to 16.
“Our case reproduction rate is now nearly two from about 1 last month so that means the disease transmission is quite high. On average, an infected person can transmit to two other people,” he said.
Dalisay said they are closely monitoring whether the reproduction rate would further increase, which could point to a possible Omicron transmission.
As of Monday night, the confirmed COVID-19 cases in the province since March 2020 have reached a total of 18,741, with 741 confirmed deaths and 17,781 recoveries.
The Omicron case in South Cotabato was among the two reported on Monday by DOH-Region 12 director Dr.[]
The other patient was an overseas Filipino worker from Glan, Sarangani province who is undergoing quarantine in Pampanga. (Allen V. Estabillo / MindaNews)