The Philippine General Hospital (PGH) clarified on Monday, Jan. 10, that only health workers who will test negative for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) will be allowed to work.

In an interview with CNN's The Source, PGH Spokesperson Dr. Jonas del Rosario made the clarification after reports that the hospital is no longer requiring quarantine for asymptomatic health workers to allow the hospital to continue operating.

"When we say asymptomatic, they are COVID-negative po. I think people had this notion that we are sending healthcare workers, who have COVID infections, back to work as long as they are asymptomatic. Hindi po yun (That's not what we're doing)," del Rosario stressed, noting that even though a health worker is asymptomatic but tested positive for COVID-19 will still need to isolate first.

According to del Rosario, 2,000 health workers in PGH are involved in the COVID-19 operations of the hospital, about 400 of them are currently infected.

"Medyo marami po talaga sa ating health workers ang infected (A lot of our health workers really got infected). So nagka-COVID po sila (They contracted COVID) and so they have to be isolated or they really have to be pulled out. We also noticed that for every one infected health worker, about three to four have been exposed, so if you use the conventional recommendation, these health workers have to go into quarantine ranging to seven to 14 days," Del Rosario said.

"We implemented that for a short while and we realized that if we're going to do that, we will ran out of health workers and so the administration decided, because of the circumstances, to really actually change our quarantine protocol because we're in a crisis mode," he added.

Del Rosario disclosed that health workers who have high-risk exposure but are fully vaccinated and asymptomatic no longer need to undergo quarantine anymore and are asked to report to work.

"We continuously monitor them. If they, at any time they're in the hospital, they feel something or they're symptomatic, they're pulled out and we have to test them and see if they have COVID. Because if we keep on quarantining, mauubos po talaga ang healthcare workers (we will run out of health workers)," he added.