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Patient Three, The Investigation Is On
posted (March 31, 2020)
And what about patient three? As we have reported, he is self isolating at a home on the Northside of the city. But, city residents want to know more, like who and exactly where. Manzanero said that is off limits - they will do the contact tracing without the gossip grapevine:

Dr. Marvin Manzanero- Director of Health Services, MOH
"People who do the mapping are detectives. They want to go out and map out the area. I know there are concerns in terms of what happens with potential cases. But I think for all practical purposes we should treat everybody as a COVID19 potential case. So, I don't think we should be overtly concerned with where specifically the person is. I shouldn't make a difference. I know people have called me directly. So, what we do is we map out the persons and we call you if we think you are at risk, once we have done the mapping exercise in that regard. So, I think it is just a call for people to take necessary precautions. Public health investigations will tell you that routinely you don't publicize names. We are already having a lot of stigma towards these patients. What we can potentially do is any of those patients who may have arrived and is escaping us and starts to become symptomatic may very well go under the radar. Any future investigation that you may want to do is going to be jeopardized by that situation. So, that's why we don't do that in public health. In terms of the mapping exercise, the circle from the initial mapping doesn't seem to be as wide as the person, the index case from San Pedro. So much so that it won't require swabbing of anybody from what we have gathered but we are still going to go ahead and do swabbing at random of potential contact."

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