A patient at the Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Medical Center (OLMCMC) in the City of San Fernando has died of COVID-19 on Friday four days after being rushed to the Emergency Department of the said hospital.
In a statement, OLMCMC President Monet Briones said the patient was rushed to the hospital on March 9, 2020, Monday.
The attending physician immediately requested for COVID-19 testing from the Regional Epidemiology Surveillance Unit (RESU).
Briones said the “patient was stratified according to the latest algorithms released by the Department of Health and was initially assessed by the RESU as not meeting the qualifications for further testing.”
“Unexpectedly, the RESU arrived a day after (March 10, 2020), informing the institution that the patient was now considered a Person Under Investigation (PUI) and confirmatory testing was immediately carried out,” according to Briones.
The test results confirmed the infection late night of March 13, 2020, two days after the patient already died. The patient died on Friday.
Briones said “contact tracing was started since the patient was declared as a PUI and is currently ongoing along with infection control measures and protocols according to the recommendations of the Center for Disease Control (CDC).”
The COVID-19 death toll in the country is now 6, according to the DOH.
More than 5,000 have already died of the disease and more than 137,000 have contracted the disease worldwide. More than 69,000 have recovered.