DOH chief grilled for slow contact tracing of nCov patient's co-passengers
MANILA, Philippines — Senators criticized the leadership of the Department of Health for failing to contact the rest of the co-passengers of a Chinese couple confirmed to have the 2019 novel coronavirus acute respiratory disease or 2019-nCoV ARD.
Health Secretary Francisco Duque III told the Senate hearing that only 17% of the 331 airplane passengers who interacted with the
Duque claimed that Philippine Airlines and Cebu Pacific are not sharing the contact details of the passengers
Philippine Airlines denied the claims of Duque that it refuses to give the names of the passengers.
PAL Vice President for Security Gen. Cesar Ronnie
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When asked who is in charge of contact tracing, Duque pointed his finger at DOH epidemiology bureau
"I don't know the steps, the specific measures of how this should
Transportation Secretary Arthur Tugade, meanwhile, suggested that the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines and the Civil Aeronautics Board should be in charge of contact tracing.
"What we have here is a glaring example of a failure to communicate," Tugade told the Senate panel.
Tugade added that the DOH does not have ascendancy nor power to force compliance among airlines to conduct contact tracing.
Sen. Francis Pangilinan, meanwhile, blamed the DOH leadership for the low rate of contacted co-passengers of the
"I beg to disagree that the secretary of Health is pointing his finger at his underling when there is only 17% of those passengers have
Pangilinan said the issue was not just a mere failure of communication but a failure of leadership on the Health department.
Sen. Panfilo Lacson agreed with Pangilinan's sentiments, pointing out that it should have been the initiative of the DOH to contact the passengers.
"What we have here, as Sen. Pangilinan mentioned, is a failure of leadership... The DOH should be on top of the situation, not the CAAP, not the [Bureau of Immigration],
Lacson stressed that the DOH should not be blaming other agencies as the 2019-
Follow this page for updates on a mysterious pneumonia outbreak that has struck dozens of people in China.
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says on Sunday that he had contracted COVID-19, testing positive at a key point in his flailing campaign for re-election.
Hipkins saYS on his official social media feed that he would need to isolate for up to five days -- less than two weeks before his country's general election.
The leader of the centre-left Labour Party said he started to experience cold symptoms on Saturday and had cancelled most of his weekend engagements. — AFP
The World Health Organization and US health authorities say Friday they are closely monitoring a new variant of COVID-19, although the potential impact of BA.2.86 is currently unknown.
The WHO classified the new variant as one under surveillance "due to the large number (more than 30) of spike gene mutations it carries", it wrote in a bulletin about the pandemic late Thursday.
So far, the variant has only been detected in Israel, Denmark and the United States. — AFP
The World Health Organization says on Friday that the number of new COVID-19 cases reported worldwide rose by 80% in the last month, days after designating a new "variant of interest".
The WHO declared in May that Covid is no longer a global health emergency, but has warned that the virus will continue to circulate and mutate, causing occasional spikes in infections, hospitalisations and deaths.
In its weekly update, the UN agency said that nations reported nearly 1.5 million new cases from July 10 to August 6, an 80% increase compared to the previous 28 days. — AFP
The head of US intelligence says that there was no evidence that the COVID-19 virus was created in the Chinese government's Wuhan research lab.
In a declassified report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says they had no information backing recent claims that three scientists at the lab were some of the very first infected with COVID-19 and may have created the virus themselves.
Drawing on intelligence collected by various member agencies of the US intelligence community (IC), the ODNI report says some scientists at the Wuhan lab had done genetic engineering of coronaviruses similar to COVID-19. — AFP
Boris Johnson deliberately misled MPs over Covid lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street when he was prime minister, a UK parliament committee ruled on Thursday.
The cross-party Privileges Committee said Johnson, 58, would have been suspended as an MP for 90 days for "repeated contempts (of parliament) and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process".
But he avoided any formal sanction by his peers in the House of Commons by resigning as an MP last week.
In his resignation statement last Friday, Johnson pre-empted publication of the committee's conclusions, claiming a political stitch-up, even though the body has a majority from his own party.
He was unrepentant again on Thursday, accusing the committee of being "anti-democratic... to bring about what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination".
Calling it "beneath contempt", he said it was "for the people of this to decide who sits in parliament, not Harriet Harman", the veteran opposition Labour MP who chaired the seven-person committee. — AFP
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