By Daisy CL Mandap
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| PAL's passenger flights from Manila have been suspended until Jan 13 |
Philippine Airlines has been suspended from flying
passengers from
The six who are all foreign domestic helpers, were not included in the list of 19 confirmed cases reported today, Dec 31, as they will need to test positive for the coronavirus a second time.
The flight ban which will be in force until Jan 13 is likely
to throw into further disarray the phased arrival of thousands of FDHs from the
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PAL is the second airline plying the
Today, five more passengers of 5J272, all FDHs, were
included in the list of confirmed cases. They all flew in on Dec 27, along with
the 36-year-old Filipina DH who tested positive on arrival at HK Airport and
was today confirmed as the first Omicron carrier from the
The five newly confirmed FDHs are all females and are identified as cases no 12642 (42 years old), 12643 (25), 12644 (36), 12645 (25) and 12646 (41).
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All of them are asymptomatic but carried the two mutant strains, N501Y and T428K associated with the highly contagious Omicron variant. They tested positive on their third day of quarantine at Penny’s Bay.
Also banned starting today until Jan 13 is Cathay Pacific
flight CX873 from
The passengers comprise two females aged 28 and 65, and a 21-year-old male patient. All carried the two mutant strains associated with Omicron.
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Also among the 19 confirmed cases today are two men linked
to a Cathay air cargo crew who had gone around the city two days after
returning from the
He was found to have Covid-19 on Dec 28 and later also tested positive for the Omicron variant.
Case 12673 is his 76-year-old father who had lunch with him at Moon Palace restaurant in Festival Walk in Kowloon Tong. Case 12654 is a 34-year-old male construction worker who ate with three relatives in the same restaurant but was at a table about 10 meters away.
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| The air crew is suspected to have spread Omicron in this Kowloon Tong restaurant |
Both patients carried the two mutant strains linked to Omicron.
The rest of the confirmed patients also carried mutant
strains. They comprise 10 males and nine females, aged 13 to 76. Five tested
positive on their arrival tests and 12 while in quarantine. The two others are
the import-related cases linked to the
Among the 17 imported cases, three were in
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Case 12639 involves a 15-year-old girl who lives at
She tested negative on arrival but her specimen taken at Penny’s Bay the next day tested positive. She had a sore throat on the same day and her sample carried the Omicron-related strains.
Case 12641 involves a 13-year-old boy who lives at Tower 1,
Kwun Lung Lau,
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During his mandatory four-day stay at Penny’s Bay he tested negative. However, after he was moved to Best Western Hotel in Sai Ying Pun he tested positive and carried the mutant strains. He is asymptomatic.
Case 12648 involves a 16-year-old male student at
A day after being sent to Penny’s Bay as a close contact of an infected patient he tested positive for Covid-19 with the mutant strains.
All the residential blocks of the three patients and the places they had visited during the incubation period, including the older boy’s school, have been included in a compulsory testing notice, in line with regulations.
Meanwhile, the CHP said that after complete genome sequencing, six more patients have been found to carry Omicron, including the Filipina DH who flew in aboard 5J272.
These cases involve three males and three females, aged 19 to 42 years old. Three of them tested positive on arrival tests and the other three tested positive during quarantine.
Including these six, a total of 87 Omicron cases have been detected in
CHP also said that starting Jan 1, 2022, it will designate three categories of cases in its daily press releases. These are confirmed, asymptomatic and re-positive cases.
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