Mayor Benjamin Magalong said the omicron variant had begun circulating in the city before Dec. 14 last year based on the history of one of the two Baguio patients detected with omicron variant by the Philippine Genome Center.
“The omicron patient’s specimen was collected on Dec. 14 and was found positive on Dec. 15 so this means the virus has been here before Dec. 14. That means we already had community transmission before Christmas,” the mayor said in an interview with the media Jan. 17.
“This explains why our cases shot up towards the end of December where our case reproduction number suddenly increased and after New Year, we saw how our cases skyrocketed because we had an extensive community transmission during that period,” the mayor said.
Based on the PGC’s biosurveillance report dated Jan. 15, omicron variant was detected in two Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) patients in the city confirming the mayor’s earlier pronouncements on the presence of the variant in the city which he based on the trend in cases, pattern of illness and symptoms of patients and other indicators.
The patients, both female aged 19 and 27 had already recovered, as per record of the city’s lead contact tracing team.
The Dept. of Health Cordillera said one patients was a close contact of a previous case, was asymptomatic and without travel history outside the city 14 days before undergoing testing. Her specimen was submitted for whole genome sequencing by the PGC on Dec. 23 and came out positive for omicron on Jan. 15.
The other patient had symptoms and also had no travel history outside the city before undergoing testing on Dec. 22 and turned positive on Dec. 24. Sample was submitted for genome testing on Dec. 28 and detected positive for omicron also on Jan. 15.
Magalong said back contact tracing and link analysis was done to determine circumstances of the patients and possibly provide a clue where the infection originated to guide the city in its preventive measures.
Also included in the PGC biosurveillance report was one delta variant case.
This brought the total of detected variants of concern (VOC) in the city to 487 broken down as follows: alpha — 117; beta — 52; delta — 217; omicron — 2.