COVID-19 Patient 7 Hospitalized at the K.H.M.H.
The Ministry of Health conducted thirty-five tests on Monday, all of which resulted negative for the COVID-19 virus. So far, three hundred and three persons have been screened and thirty-one are under investigation. The number of confirmed cases remains at seven, including now deceased Hubert Pipersburgh, known as patient four. Mapping of persons he came in contact with continues and the testing of persons who came in contact with patient six has begun. Patient seven has been moved to the isolation unit at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital. Patient five is under mandatory quarantine and is not showing signs, while the remaining four patients are under self-isolation. Director of Health Service Doctor Marvin Manzanero today appeared on Ask the Experts where he provided more details of the COVID-19 patients.
Marvin Manzanero
Dr. Marvin Manzanero, Director of Health Services
“That mapping exercise along with our expanded screening that we did on Saturday is what allowed us to do what is a record in terms of number of test conducted on Saturday. A total of two hundred and two tests done in one single day. Most of them were from the mapping exercise from patient number four and as we said we are going to scale up the testing. So what we had done on that Saturday is that we swabbed persons who were in the mandatory quarantine area in Corozal. That is what allowed us to identified patient number five who remains asymptomatic in the mandatory quarantine area without any treatment. So that is patient number five. We also did further swabbing of secondary contacts if you will or not so immediate contacts of what we had then as a patient number four and those tests were run on Sunday. That is how we managed to identified patient number six. We have established a link between patient number six and patient number four who we still have not been able to ascertain who the first case was in that regard. And patient number seven is a patient we swabbed because we also said that we were going to be swabbing people who were having respiratory conditions inside hospital facilities. So this patient number seven is a patient who had been diagnosed with community acquired pneumonia. Initially managed in San Ignacio and as per our protocol he was subsequently referred to the Western Regional Hospital which is where he was swabbed which is where the diagnosis was made. He was sent on to Karl Heusner yesterday in case he would have required any ventilation support. However the last note I got was that he was not under mechanical ventilation. He was under supplementary oxygen.”
