ENB confirms one Delta case, other test results still pending

By ROSELYN ELLISON
EAST New Britain (ENB) has a confirmed case of the Coronavirus (Covid-19) Delta variant but a lot of test results are pending.
Provincial incident manager Dr Alex Maha told a review meeting on Monday that the way the current surge was behaving in the province pointed to the Delta variant.
Dr Maha said there was an increase of 29 per cent Covid-19 cases and 61 per cent increase in the number of deaths.
The provincial increase in the number of deaths was twice the increase seen throughout the nation.
“To put that into perspective, in the last seven days, we have seven deaths and in the last one week, the Covid-19 was the leading cause of deaths in ENB,” Dr Maha said.
“These are the known cases.
“We still do not know how many people died out there in the communities, it might be more.
“We estimated that two people died from tuberculosis every week and that is the leading medical cause of deaths.”
The province has 39 health workers currently in isolation.
Napapar Catholic Health Centre is closed because most of the health workers are in isolation, mid-wives in the clinics and hospitals are doing double shifts because many of their colleagues are in isolation and many other frontline workers in isolation.
Dr Maha said teachers were in isolation and these included some student teachers in the teachers’ colleges.
“Most of our positive cases this week are children of health workers,” he said.
“One of the tragic cases that the province has now is a two-month old infant who is in hospital now fighting for his life and his parents are both positive.
“The mother is a nurse, neither has been vaccinated.”
Dr Maha said one death this week was a 22-year-old, who was five months’ pregnant.
He said the province had a high community transmission.