4 Cebu City workers found positive for COVID-19, stopped in Samboan port
CEBU CITY, Philippines — Four construction workers from Cebu City were prevented from boarding a boat in a wharf in Samboan town in southern Cebu after the Philippine Coast Guard found them positive for COVID-19.
Councilor Joel Garganera, deputy chief implementor of the Emergency Operations Center (EOC), said that these four construction workers had taken a real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test to travel home to Negros Island.
They received the results of their test and did not open these because they did not understand the results.
Instead, the four workers traveled by bus to Samboan town where the Coast Guard opened the results and found they were positive.
“Gidala sila dinhi sa EOC sa Samboan, and naa na sila naka isolate sa atong BIC (barangay isolation center),” said Garganera.
(They were brought here in the EOC of Samboan, and there are there being isolated at our BIC [barangay isolation center].)
The Samboan EOC are also conducting contact tracing to all individuals that the four workers encountered in the bus.
Councilor Joel Gargarnera, EOC deputy chief implementor of Cebu City | Screen grab of Councilor Joel Garganera video (file photo)
To avoid a similar incident, Garganera appealed to laboratories accepting walk-in RT-PCR testing to provide a holding area for the individuals waiting for their test results or advice them to isolate at home.
He said that since results could now be released within 24 hours or even on the same day, the tested individuals would no longer wait for days to get these results.
Laboratories should make sure that the individuals would know their results and understand them properly.
If the individual is positive, they must be informed immediately through text or phone message and be coordinated to the local government unit (LGU) for extraction.
If the individual is negative, the laboratory should explain the results so that the individual could understand them.
“We cannot expect nga tanan makadawat sa results kasabot sila, so iexplain nato. Responsibility na sa laboratory,” said the councilor.
(We cannot expect everybody who can receive the results will understand them, so they should explain that. That is the responsibility of the laboratory.)
The councilor said this incident should not happen again because the exposure of the unknowing patients had placed all their contacts at risk.
Garganera also encouraged tested individuals to check their results immediately after getting the document from the laboratory.
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