DOH Says They Are Still Locating 8 Travelers Who Arrived From South Africa
DOH OMICRON VARIANT – The Department of Health (DOH) said they are still locating the 8 travelers who arrived from South Africa.
Recently, the world was met with a new variant of COVID-19 named the “Omicron Variant”. The new strain was first discovered by South African scientists, thus, the world had an early start to prepare for the new variant.
In the Philippines, authorities had yet to report an omicron variant case. However, travel bans are yet to be imposed on some countries where the new strain was found.
According to an article from ABS-CBN, there were eight travelers from South Africa that arrived in the Philippines between November 15 and 29. But, contact tracing efforts are still underway.
So far, the DOH has located 80 travelers. Among these people, 77 were returning Filipinos. Meanwhile, 3 were foreign nationals. Still, there are 165 more travelers with ongoing verification.
As per the article, DOH Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said:
Out of all of those samples tested in the latest genome sequencing run, wala pong na-detect na Omicron variant, most of the detections were that of the Delta variant
The travelers that arrived in the country were from Burkina Faso and Egypt. Meanwhile, Vergeire noted that the samples of 3 of the travelers were amongst those of the 12 returning OFWs.
Currently, the Philippines has 7,848 samples of the new Delta Variant. This accounts for 40.35 percent of the 19,305 samples with lineages according to DOH data. Following this are the Beta variants and the Alpha variants with 3,630 cases and 3,168 cases respectively.
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