Patients breaking quarantine will be taken into hospital

Son Espases Hospital.

18-08-2020Miquel À. Cañellas

The Balearic health ministry is acting if patients who are positive for coronavirus break their mandatory quarantine. Carlos Raduan of the Covid Coordination Central said on Tuesday that these patients are being admitted to hospital in order to guarantee their isolation and to ensure that they do not put other members of the public at risk.

He explained that over the past couple of months, the 112 emergencies centre has received almost one hundred alerts of positive cases who could not be located at home, when they should have been isolating.

Admitting these patients to hospital is «the only solution» to also guarantee that close contacts of someone who is positive adhere to the quarantine required by health protocols. These close contacts must remain isolated until the results of a test. Even if the first test is negative, they must continue the quarantine until a second test is carried out and the same result is obtained.

Raduan also spoke about the difficulty of contact-tracing when a new positive is reported. The effort starts with family and work contacts, but it can be especially complicated when infections occur in crowds, such as parties. He explained that close contact is considered to be direct contact for more than fifteen minutes at less than two metres distance.

But tracing a single case «can take many hours». Therefore, the plan is to add more people to the tracing teams in order to be able to «close the circle» for each case as quickly as possible and stop the spread of infection.

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Source: majorcadailybulletin.com