Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 30) — The National Kidney and Transplant Institute confirmed on Thursday that 23 of its healthcare workers were infected with COVID-19 after being exposed to three patients in the hospital’s intensive care unit who caught the coronavirus
“[M]ula noong March 13 hanggang April 28, nagkaroon kami ng mga health worker na 23 na nag-COVID(-19-positive),” NKTI Executive Director Dr. Rose Marie Rosete-Liquete told CNN Philippines’ Balitaan. “Hindi naman sila yung serious na sabihin natin. Ang karamihan doon ay asymptomatic nga, eh.”
[Translation: From March 13 to April 28, we have had 23 health workers who were positive for COVID-19. They aren’t what we could consider as serious. Most of them are even asymptomatic.]
However, she lamented how the delay in the results of swabbing tests for the patients the healthcare workers have interacted with and could have possibly gotten the virus from.
“Yung mga nurses namin, alam din naman nila na maski na-swab namin— namamatay na, di pa namin nas-swab. Kung na-swab man namin, wala namang resulta. How would we know na yung mga pasyenteng nahawakan namin ay positive, di ba?,” Rosete-Liquete explained.
She added that infected patients initially tested negative for the virus, but tested positive eventually.
[Translation: Our nurses know that despite us having swabbed the patients— even if they have already died, they still haven’t gotten swabbed. Even if we were able to swab some of them, how would we have known the patients we interacted with are positive, right?]
She added that NKTI initially sent swab tests for confirmation to the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM). After it had to scale down operations with some of its personnel testing positive for COVID-19, the hospital turned to the Lung Center of the Philippines (LCP) instead.
However, Rosete-Liquete said the over a hundred test results have been pending from LCP since April 7.
Eventually, the NKTI sent swab tests to the Philippine Red Cross for confirmation, where Rosete-Liquete said they finally found out some of their nurses and doctors did catch the deadly virus.
Infected health workers are immediately pulled out of duty and made to undergo quarantine, she said.
On April 8, NKTI released an advisory saying it can only accept kidney patients under investigation (PUI) “who are dependent on renal replacement therapy such as hemodialysis (HD) and peritoneal dialysis (PD).” They shall then be admitted in tents at the Emergency Room – COVID field until RT-PCR results come out negative, the hospital said.
The hospital wasn’t able to follow the advisory anyway, said Rosete-Liquete.
“[H]indi namin nagagawa yun dahil aanhin mo kung andiyan na sa doorstep namin, ano? So naghalo rin yung mga di nagd-dialysis,” she explained.
[Translation: We weren’t able to do it because what could we have done if (the patient) was already at our doorstep? So even those not undergoing dialysis were added to the mix (of dialysis patients).]
“Ang bottomline is that if only we had the results early, mas madali naming na-cohort ang mga pasyente. And we could have helped also our frontliner na, o ito, positive pala ito, out ka na muna, rest. You know, quarantine agad,” Rosete-Liquete said.
[Translation: The bottomline is, if only we had the results early, it would be easier to place patients in cohorts. And we could have helped our frontliners like, oh, this one is actually positive, so you must go out for now, rest. You know, (go under) quarantine immediately.]
