BAGUIO CITY – – About 87 percent of Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center(BGHMC) personnel are vaccinated against COVID-19 and demand generation activities are ongoing to encourage the rest of the employees to volunteer for the vaccination program.
Ashley Melecio of the BGHMC Public Health Unit, in a Kapihan media forum here, reported that out of the 2,699 employees, 2,663 or 98 percent are masterlisted for the vaccination program. As of May 5, 2,356 or 87 percent were already vaccinated with their first dose.
Of the vaccinated employees, 1,556 (58%) already completed their two doses of Sinovac vaccine. 856 are set to be vaccinated with their second dose, 113 of them with Sinovac and 743 with AstraZeneca vaccine.
For vaccination deferrals recorded at BGHMC, among the reasons gathered were due to active disease or symptoms, just recently received other vaccines, auto-immune disorders, pregnant or planning to get pregnant and allergy to vaccine.
Registration to the vaccination masterlist is still open and demand generation activities continue as BGHMC still targets to cover 100 percent of its employees, Melecio said.
For the COVID-19 update at BGHMC, Infectious Disease Specialist Dr. Bernard Demot affirmed that case management is coping with the continuing surge of new cases coming in. The hospital, he said, is expanding its capacity as needed.
BGHMC’s Flavier and Infectious Disease Buildings are wholly dedicated to COVID – 19 with a total of 245 isolation beds and 50 Intensive Care Units. Renovation of the Psychiatry Building is ongoing and will also be dedicated for COVID – 19 cases.
The hospital has 30 mechanical ventilators, Demot added.
Since the start of the pandemic last year 1,915 confirmed COVID – 19 cases were admitted at the BGHMC. Currently, there are 143 active admissions where 15 are with mild symptoms, 34 moderate 78 severe and 16 critical cases.
In terms of COVID – 19 testing, the BGHMC Molecular lab is fully operational with no backlog. It has three RT – PCR machines testing an average of 1,000 samples per day, and maintaining a turnaround time of 24 to 48 hours.
For the whole month of April, the BGHMC Molecular laboratory processed 48,136 samples from Cordillera; 1,837 from Region 1 and 56 from Region 2. **JDP/CCD-PIA CAR