The municipality of Siaton in Negros Oriental, about an hour’s drive south of here, has logged its first confirmed coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) case.

Mayor Cezanne Fritz Diaz, who chairs the municipal Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (MIATF-EID), in a livestream on Facebook on Sunday, announced that the town’s first Covid-19 case is a two-year-old-child.

He said that the patient arrived on Aug. 1, along with 11 other locally-stranded individuals, onboard a 2GO vessel from Manila and disembarked at the city port here.

Upon arrival in Siaton, they were all subjected to rapid diagnostic testing, and were found reactive of antibodies, which prompted the local IATF in that town to have them throat-swabbed, Diaz said.

On Aug. 7, they received the throat-swab test results, which showed that the child was positive for the coronavirus.

The patient is asymptomatic and is in stable at the town gymnasium, which is now being used as a patient care center.

Diaz said the municipal IATF has agreed to do a re-swabbing of the other LSIs in the same group as that of the child as there is possibility that the mother is also infected “kay syempre, dos anyos ang bata, kugoson gud na sige sa inahan (the child is only two years and old and naturally the mother will be carrying her child most of the time)”.

He appealed to Siatanons to heed health and safety protocols amid the local government’s efforts in the past five months or so to keep the town free of Covid-19.

“Mag-amping ta kung muadto ta ug Dumaguete (let us take the necessary precautions if we go to Dumaguete),” he said, referring to the reported local transmission of Covid-19 in a family from Barangay Cadawinonan here.

He noted that the Cadawinonan cases did not even have a history of travel and so the source of the infection was not immediately known.

One of the two Cadawinonan cases was an 82-year-old-female who died last July 26 at the Negros Oriental Provincial Hospital of community-acquired pneumonia. Post-mortem throat swab test showed that she had contracted the coronavirus and the second case is her 52-year-old-daughter. (PNA)