Remain vigilant against COVID-19 imported at all times

The Ministry of Health and Sports has reported a total of 359 coronavirus positive cases up to 8 August 2020 in Myanmar. The recovery cases also reached 311 with a death toll of six. The national figures showed that most of the positive cases were imported ones and that the country needs to stay vigilant against the spread of this virus from an epidemic source country or region.


Infected persons with no symptoms of this disease can travel to another region, causing the spread of the virus. As a result, COVID-19 is still a severe threat to other regions through transportation services. Myanmar saw many cases of coronavirus infection associated with travel history from an epidemic source country or region, and some positive cases had contact history to people from the region, while some cases were the secondary ones transmitted from the imported cases respectively.


The chain of imported cases has people come from a city or a country with an outbreak arrived in other areas; the infection began to those who had very close contacts with them, resulting in secondary cases. Then, local transmission occurred among the people without contact history with the imported cases or travel history to the outbreak source. With realizing the danger of this chain of infection, the government is still taking strict preventive measures against this pandemic. The imported cases could only be isolated or quarantined by imposing the strict control policy against this disease. More, contact tracing and isolation of cases are very difficult to be carried out on secondary cases than imported. Early prediction of the infection chain by the imported case is very critical to prevent local transmission.


The Ministry of Health and Sports is putting in place a range of public health and social measures, like other countries, in different combinations and at varying times in the local evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, public cooperation is needed to have constant vigilance against local transmission through imported cases of the coronavirus pandemic. That is why do remain vigilant against COVID-19 imported at all times.

 

GNLM