AT LEAST 17 health care workers have been infected by coronavirus disease (Covid–19) out of the 53 cases in the Cordillera region.

Doctor Amelita Pangilinan, regional director of the Department of Health (DOH)–Cordillera said of the 17 health workers, 16 are hospital employees with a lone administrative staff.

“Majority are nurses with six followed by four physicians, two nursing assistants, two ambulance drivers, a midwife, a data encoder and a program coordinator,” Pangilinan said.

The latest case of infection is a 38-year-old male nurse of the Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center (BGHMC) and a resident of South Central Aurora Hill.

His results came out Tuesday, June 2 and is now admitted at BGHMC isolation facility. Contact tracing and disinfection are ongoing.

In its June 2 medical health update, DOH–CAR reported an additional seven cases since last week.

“In our last briefing we reported 46 and there is now an additional seven cases. We still have one death with a case fatality rate of 1.9 percent and a recovery of 43 or 83 percent recovery rate,” Pangilinan added.

Baguio has the highest Covid–19 infections with 35 cases followed by Benguet with 12, Abra with three, Ifugao with two and one in Apayao.

Pangilinan, meanwhile, said validation process for Covid–19 has sped up significantly over the past week as a result of increased testing and efforts to close the testing backlog.

The recent rollout of the COVIDKAYA information system, a fully automated data collection platform that has helped the department receive live updates from hospitals and laboratories across the Philippines.

“The daily case total profile comprise of old and fresh cases. Rise in cases is due to the increase testing and clearing of backlog. We felt this in the region when our Baguio General Hospital sub-national hospital experienced backlog,” Pangilanan said.

The health official said reporting of Covid-19 cases experienced delays due to operational issues with the manual data collection but stressed this does not translate to an increase in local transmission.

“The number of confirmed cases as a result of the increased testing and the aggressive efforts of the DOH to catch up with the testing backlog showed an increase in fresh and new cases. An example of this is the data on May 28 which showed 539 cases reported and out of this 539 cases, 109 were only fresh cases or those cases that have just finished laboratory results in the span of three days after testing, while the remaining balance composed of those late cases that have been released by BGHMC pertaining to other earlier cases as evaluated by our epidemiology bureau,” Pangilinan added.

DOH-CAR reminded the public to strictly adhere to the maximum health standards being imposed by the government in line with the region’s transition to a modified general community quarantine.