ILOILO City – Students formed majority of the recent cases in the city of the more transmissible Omicron BA.5 variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
The city logged 17 cases of the Omicron subvariant recently. All cases have no history of travel.
Based on the data of the City Epidemiology and Surveillance Unit (CESU), at least nine students have been infected by the Omicron BA.5 variant and mostly are medical students.
Data also showed that the subvariant cases involved one medical doctor and his three family members, and a nurse while the rest are individual cases of ordinary citizen such as a wife of a judge and an engineer.
Three of the cases have repeat positive results while the rest have already yielded negative results but will still undergo reswabbing this Saturday after a 14-day quarantine.
Meanwhile, the two cases who were earlier reported to be admitted at the hospital have already been discharged. One of them is a medical doctor who have a comorbidity.
According to the CESU, the surge in new cases was observed since several students from a medical school tested positive for COVID-19 and some of the specimens underwent genome sequencing.
There were actually 95 students in one medical school who were quarantined by the school since the first index case was reported, until at least 20 of them tested positive for COVID-19.
Nineteen of whom were tagged in Iloilo City while there were also several students tagged in Iloilo province.
CESU has been conducting contact tracing since the results came out on June 6, 7 and 12.
The Omicron BA.5 variant was first detected in South Africa on February 2022.
Preliminary studies have shown that the BA.5 variant is more transmissible than the B.1.1.529 Omicron variant.
Based on the recommendations of the Inter-agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-MEID) Task Force on COVID-19 New Variants, cases positive for BA.5 variant of concern, either asymptomatic or with mild or moderate symptoms, must complete 14-day isolation, while 21-day hospital isolation shall be observed for severe/critical cases./PN
