The government may take legal action against Filipino travelers from South Africa who have not yet been located due to missing or incorrect information they provided upon arriving in the Philippines amid a COVID-19 scare.
Earlier, the Department of Health (DOH) said it was having difficulty tracing seven of the eight travelers who arrived in the country from Nov. 15 to 29 due to the lack of information or wrong information.
“If they are caught, they will be reprimanded and charged because they should not provide incorrect information,” said Health Secretary Francisco Duque III, who also chairs the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF).
“We want to conduct back tracing and we are having difficulties because we don’t know where to search for them. So we are still investigating this,” Duque said in Filipino in an interview over radio dzBB.
Only seven travelers remain unaccounted for as of Wednesday.
The located traveler is currently undergoing home quarantine and has tested negative for COVID-19.
All are returning overseas Filipinos.
Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said three provided their agency number, one provided an incorrect number, one an incomplete number, and two cannot be contacted.
Duque said there is a law mandating that all information provided must be true, especially in the middle of a public health emergency.
Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles noted that a law penalizes people who give false information during a public health emergency. These penalties may include a fine of P20,000 to P50,000 and imprisonment of one to six months.
The quarantine bureau is coordinating with the police and interior department to locate the missing travelers.
“The Bureau of Quarantine cleared them. We just need to contact them to make sure that they had no symptoms while they were on home quarantine,” the bureau’s deputy director Dr. Roberto Salvador Jr. said in a televised public briefing.
He noted some migrant workers have no local cell phone numbers when they return to the Philippines, and instead use the contact details of their manning agencies.
The Philippines has yet to detect any case of Omicron which the World Health Organization classified as a “variant of concern.”
The government is monitoring all health and isolation facilities, Nograles said.
“We are preparing them for the worst case scenario,” he said.
Nograles added that authorities are monitoring countries with spikes in COVID-19 cases for possible inclusion in the Philippine travel ban.
“European countries, for instance, are the countries that we’re really taking a closer look at,” said the official.
He said the IATF on Wednesday put France in the red list effective Dec. 10 to 15, making it the 15th country on the roster.
Travelers who have been to France in the last 14 days who will arrive on Dec. 10 to 12 will be required to undergo facility-based quarantine for 14 days with an RT-PCR test on the seventh day.
Even with a negative RT-PCR result, the completion of the 14-day quarantine is required, Nograles said.
Only Filipinos returning to the country through government-initiated or non-government-initiated repatriation, and Bayanihan Flights may be allowed entry, subject to existing testing and quarantine protocols for red list countries.
“All passengers, whether Filipinos or foreigners, merely transiting through France shall not be deemed as having come from or having been to said country if they stayed in the airport the whole time and were not cleared for entry into such country by its immigration authorities,” he said.
“Upon arrival in the Philippines, they shall comply with the applicable testing and quarantine protocols for passengers who have not been to any Red List country/territory/jurisdiction,” he added.