Tawi Tawi: The Datu Halun Sakilan Memorial Hospital (DHSMH) in Bongao here has been ordered a total shutdown after 72 medical frontliners and 8 doctors were confirmed infected with SARS-CoV-2, the strain of virus that causes the Covid-19 illness.
“The government provincial hospital is now completely closed after our 72 health-care providers and 8 medical doctors contracted the coronavirus,” health officials in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) announced on Tuesday.
Dr. Amirel Usman, acting regional health minister, approved the request of the Integrated Provincial Health Office (Ipho) in to temporarily close DHSMH.
“This is a very alarming situation,” Usman said.
He said closing the hospital for other health services would help prevent the spread of the virus.
But the isolation centre within the hospital compound will continue to operate to attend to the health needs of 80 new infections.
Usman has also allowed Ipho and hospital authorities to temporarily reassign health-care workers from other stations in the province to augment the remaining personnel at DHSMH.
He directed Tawi-Tawi health officials to request the BARMM Ministry of Health to send more doctors to the province.
Women who are about to give birth are also advised to go to barangay and rural health stations, and private lying-in clinics as the hospital could not accommodate them.
Municipal health stations will assume other services of DHSMH, such as consultations, outpatient department services and minor surgeries.
“If health-care workers fall victims to this outbreak, then we have shattered our first and only line of defence against the pandemic. We need to support our health-care workers with everything we’ve got before it’s too late,” said BARMM lawmaker Eddie Mapag Alih, a member of the Bangsamoro Transition Authority parliament, in a statement.
Tawi-Tawi, as of this week, had recorded 104 Covid-19 cases, with seven deaths.
On Sunday, 29 new cases were reported in the BARMM, raising the total number of Covid-19 infections in the region to 1,083.
The region has 255 active cases and recorded 787 recoveries and 41 deaths.
In Caraga, the regional Department of Health’s Centre for Health Development (CHD) identified four towns and cities with new cases of local virus transmission.
Sixteen of the 34 new cases on Saturday were reported in the towns of Nasipit, Remedios T. Romualdez, Buenavista and the city of Cabadbaran in Agusan del Norte province; San Francisco town in Agusan del Sur province; and Surigao City.
CHD monitored a total of 560 cases of local transmission in the region, or 50 percent of the 1,125 Covid-19 cases in the region.
