Does Cebu have the mutated virus?

Last Sunday was a great blessing for me and my family. I registered for the 11 a.m. Mass in the Sacred Heart Parish and was accepted, so it was the first time we went to a Holy Mass in a church. For the past five months, we had only heard Masses via livestream on TV, in which after the priest gives the Holy Communion, we pray an act of spiritual communion. As you know, that is not the same as receiving the holy body of our Lord Jesus Christ, his blood, soul and divinity or his real presence.

More than a week ago, I wrote a column about having a eucharistic fasting, and I found out that Pope Benedict XVI also wrote about this issue. It was then that I learned that for five months, we had suffered through a eucharistic fasting, our way of personally suffering during this time of the pandemic.

But while Cebu City churches are allowed to have 10% of its parishioners in, there were only around 15 people inside the church with us. It only means that our parishioners have to learn to get their reservations before going to Mass or they just got used to hearing mass on TV. There, you don’t have to dress up. As for me, for as long as we remain in GCQ, I will now hear the Holy Mass in a church.

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Just when we Cebuanos have begun to follow what the IATF ordained so that we would not go back to the modified enhanced community quarantine (MECQ), we just read the ugly news that a newly uncovered mutation of the novel coronavirus, believed to be more infectious than the original variant, has been detected in the Philippines. In Malaysia, their mutation is supposedly 10 times more than the ordinary COVID-19 virus.

The new mutation has been reported to have become the dominant coronavirus strain circulating around the world. Researchers call it G614. When the outbreak began in the country last March, the original D614 genotype showed up in the positive samples collected by the Philippine Genome Center (PGC). But in a new study, genomic researchers detected both the D614 and the G614.

Although this information confirms the presence of G614 in the Philippines, we note that all the samples tested were from Quezon City and may not represent the mutational landscape for the whole country. So the question I would like to know is whether G614 has been detected in Cebu.

Researchers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Duke University in North Carolina published a study last month showing that a specific change in SARS-CoV-2 virus genome is more infectious in cell culture. The team analyzed the data of 999 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United Kingdom and observed that those infected with G614 had more viral particles in them.

The novel coronavirus has so far infected 161,253 people in the country despite one of the longest and strictest lockdowns. Of the figure, 112,586 have recovered and 2,665 have died.

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The Department of Education has moved reopening of public schools from Aug. 24 to Oct. 5. But DepEd has clarified that private or non-DepEd schools that have already started their classes, or are scheduled to start classes on dates ahead of Oct. 5, are allowed to proceed, provided they are strictly using only distance learning modalities and that there are no face-to-face classes.

The new advisory clarified that private schools may open classes before Oct. 5. Data reveal that at least 2,195 private schools intend to open on Aug. 24, while at least 1,277 schools have set the start of classes before that date. In the end, Malacañang defended the move to delay the opening of classes to Oct. 5 this year, instead of the earlier Aug. 24, attributing it to the health concerns caused by the coronavirus pandemic in the country. At this point in time, whether they open on Aug. 24 or Oct. 5, the school needs to really open.

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