BACOLOD CITY, Negros Occidental, Philippines – The newest COVID-positive case here could have been locally-transmitted, the head of the local inter-agency task force here told DNX.
As this developed, Familiaran said all nine relatives of Patient 8 in the sub-village of Sabes, Villamonte barangay, tested negative while a neighbor was found positive in a rapid test.
Patient 9, a woman aged 65 from the coastal village of Banago, could be the second locally-transmitted case if it could be established that she contracted the virus locally as she had no travel history to areas outside the city identified to be high risk.
As news of the latest confirmed case broke, health authorities here have also started the contact tracing in the coastal village that has an estimated population of close to 30,000 in 2015, according to the statistics authority office.
If proven to be locally transmitted, Patient 9 would become the second local transmission case here, after Patient 8 who could have contracted it from his son who had travelled to Iloilo and Cebu cities.
Cebu has currently one of the highest cases in the country.
Banago is one of the coastal barangays of Bacolod with a population of 28,217 according to the census of the Philippine Statistics Authority or five percent of the more than 600,000 total population of the city.
According to the World Health Organization, local transmission is when the source of the infection is within the reporting location.
Community transmission, meanwhile, is evidenced by the inability to relate confirmed cases through chains of transmission for a large number of cases, or by increasing positive tests through routine screening of sentinel samples.
