By Uriel Quilinguing, Contributing Editor .
FOR every person found with Covid-19, 10 others feared to have caught the disease get quarantined to cut the chain of transmission, an official of the interior and local government agency said yesterday.
Yvette Tolentino Sunga, assistant director of Department of Interior and Local Government Region 10, in a Covid-19 inter-agency news conference, disclosed that the region’s contact tracer-close contact ratio is currently at 1:10.
Sunga said that the 1:10 is an improvement of the 1:4 CT-CC ratio which “contact tracing czar” Benjamin Magalong of the national Covid-19 inter-agency task force computed when he visited the region three months ago.
“Our contact tracing has improved due to the augmentation of 2,000 contact tracers that we deployed to local governments,” said the DILG 10 official, a move which she said boosted the region’s case detection strategy.
“For rural areas, the prescribed ratio is from 1:26 to 1:29,” said Sunga, who further clarified that the 1:37 CT-CC ratio which Magalong set as national norm is applicable only for highly urbanized cities. The retired police director is currently the city mayor of Baguio.
Dr. Lorraine Nery, the acting city health officer of Cagayan de Oro, said she has sent the 458 DILG 10-paid contact tracers to barangays with high number of Covid-19 infections, some are with the emergency operations center which she heads.
Nery said the DILG 10-hired contractual workers augmented their over a thousand trained contract tracers in her office, in police stations and 80 barangays.
Meanwhile, Dr. Joselito Retuya Jr., a resident epidemiologist of the city health office here, said that the city’s CT-CC ratio is 1:5 based on their records from the time the pandemic begun in March this year.
Retuya said that the 1:5 ratio is based on the 5,492 persons which they had quarantined for their exposures to over 1,300 confirmed Covid-19 cases, including index cases from local transmissions, since March this year.
He said that the city’s CT-CC ratio is relatively low because of the risk assessment that their contact-tracing teams do, extracting only those who had moderate to high exposures to coronavirus-infected persons.
Every local government has at least one contact tracer which the DILG 10 hired and deployed, whose contract will expire by yearend. One is expected to render eight-hours-five-days a week of services which regular government workers do, with no overtime pay.
