Three Pasay City residents infected with the South African variant of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) have all recovered, Mayor Emi-Calixto Rubiano said Tuesday (March 2).
The Department of Health (DOH) said it has recorded six South African variant cases in the country: three are local cases, two are returning Overseas Filipinos (ROFs), while the last case is still being verified as to location.
The three local cases were reported to be residents of Pasay City, and whose samples were collected between January 27 and February 13.
The patients were identified as a 61-year-old female, a 39-year-old male, and a 40-year-old male.
The 40-year-old male patient was first to recover, according to DOH.
One of the patients, according to Rubiano, was a seafarer living in a transient home. The mayor, however, did not specify which barangay.
“One of them recovered yesterday, the other one recovered a few days earlier,” the mayor said in Filipino.
Rubiano also mentioned that the local government of Pasay is continuously sending samples from COVID-19 patients in the city to the Philippine Genome Center for sequencing.
The mayor said that even before the announcement of the presence of the South African variant, they have been stepping up their efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19 in the city.
A spike in COVID-19 cases was recorded in the city in the past few days. Its City Epidemiology and Disease Surveillance Unit (CESU) suspected that the surge could have been from the more contagious United Kingdom (UK) variant of the disease and residents who got tested outside the city and did not inform their respective barangays.
So far, no connection has been established.
As of 6:10 p.m. on March 1, the city logged a total of 519 active cases with 44 new cases. The city has not stated whether the surge had something to do with the presence of the South African variant.