The tests were meant to answer one narrow question: was it the new coronavirus, or something ordinary? In Aklan province, that question landed on four people in the third week of January 2020. Three were Chinese tourists headed for Boracay Island. The fourth was a flight attendant.
Dr. Cornelio Cuachon Jr., the provincial health officer, told the Philippine Daily Inquirer on January 22 that two of the tourists, a woman from Shanghai, aged 29, and a man aged 65 from Dazu District in Chongqing City, had symptoms that did not match the World Health Organization’s case definition for the virus. That definition required severe acute respiratory infection plus travel to Wuhan, the city in Hubei province where the new strain was first detected. Their blood and saliva samples were referred to the national tropical medicine research institute in Manila, which put the results on hold. Once the provincial hospital signs off, both may fly home to China.
The third patient was a three-year-old Chinese girl. Her first samples could not be used because they did not work with the reagent in the test, so staff took new ones. The Department of Health said earlier that all three were on the mend from flu-like symptoms.
The flight attendant
The flight attendant had coughed enough to worry her. She went to a private doctor on her own, who sent her to the provincial hospital, where she stayed overnight on Tuesday. She had flown to Wuhan but had not left the plane. She was discharged on Wednesday, January 22, and her samples went to the same institute.
Wuhan shuts, and the tourists are still on the island
Within two days the picture changed. Wuhan was locked down, and flights between the city and Kalibo were suspended indefinitely. The country’s civil aviation authority, CAAP, said the two carriers on the route, Pan Pacific and Royal Air Charter, would fly their remaining passengers home. Between them they ran six charter flights a week. A Pan Pacific flight with 135 people on board had landed at Kalibo International Airport around 6 a.m. Thursday, the last arrival before the lockdown. Those passengers were scanned with hand-held thermal devices, allowed to deplane and sent on to Boracay.
“If there is an increase in body temperature, they will be isolated and brought to (the) government hospital if necessary,” CAAP spokesperson Eric Apolonio said. The Standard in Hong Kong, citing CNN, reported that nearly 500 Chinese visitors from Wuhan would be sent back in three batches. Cuachon said none of the 135 had been quarantined or referred for hospital care because none showed red-flag symptoms such as fever.
Not everyone on Boracay was reassured. Residents pointed out that the incubation period can last up to 14 days, so a clean thermal scan proves little. “They (tourists from Wuhan) are already here and we don’t know if they are infected or not even if they passed the thermal scanners,” one resident told the Inquirer. Some wanted every flight from China stopped, not only those from Wuhan. The stakes for the island are high. In 2019, 434,175 visitors from China came to Boracay, 41.84 percent of its 1,032,619 foreign tourists.
By January 28, Rappler reported, a 6-year-old boy who had been to Wuhan had tested negative in the institute’s tests. “He had influenza, not novel coronavirus,” Cuachon said. Samples from two sisters aged 8 and 6, admitted on January 26, had gone to the same lab for confirmatory tests.
Sources
- 2 of 3 Boracay-bound Chinese tourists were ill, but not likely from coronavirus, says Aklan doc (Philippine Daily Inquirer)
- Wuhan tourists on Boracay to be flown back to China (Philippine Daily Inquirer)
- Philippines to send 500 Chinese tourists back to Wuhan (The Standard, Hong Kong)
- 11 Chinese tourists in Aklan under observation for exposure to coronavirus (Rappler)
