8 Fabella hospital staff get COVID-19

MANILA, Philippines — The Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital has suspended admissions and laboratory services after eight of its medical staff tested positive for COVID-19, an official said yesterday.

Dr. Diane Cajipe of the maternity hospital’s public information office said they suspended the admission of patients and stopped outpatient, ultrasound and x-ray services to give way to disinfection procedures after seven doctors and a nurse were infected.

“The hospital deemed it necessary to do contact tracing and then do testing of all the health workers of Fabella hospital,” she added.

In a Twitter post, Philippine Red Cross chairman Richard Gordon said that he received an “urgent call” yesterday morning from hospital director Esmeraldo Ilem, “requesting for PRC’s assistance to swab their 180 healthcare staff.”

“If they will not be tested, they will be forced to stop operations since they need to be isolated for 14 days, being close contacts of the positive cases,” he added.

Gordon said the PRC will “test them immediately for humanitarian purposes and we are not going to charge their personnel.”

“We said it before and we will say it again – we must protect our frontliners. These healthcare workers are at the forefront since day one and have worked nonstop to deliver the best… care. They are very important. We will undertake the testing,” he added.

Early this month, the PRC stopped providing free testing to overseas Filipino workers and frontliners after the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. failed to pay some P930 million in COVID-19 testing costs.

PRC data showed that as of yesterday, it has tested a total of 34,093 health workers in 15 DOH hospitals nationwide regularly, once every two weeks.

On Oct. 5, the PRC’s 10 laboratories reached one million swab tests for COVID-19, barely six months after the agency opened its first bio-molecular laboratory on April 14.

The PRC accounts for 26 percent of swab tests done in the country.