Two Thais test positive for Covid after quarantine

Students at Anuban Sangkhla Buri School in Kanchanaburi's Sangkhla Buri district gather at assembly on Wednesday. The school in this border district next to Myanmar imposes strict measures to curb the Covid-19 pandemic. (Photo by Piyarat Chongcharoen)
Students at Anuban Sangkhla Buri School in Kanchanaburi's Sangkhla Buri district gather at assembly on Wednesday. The school in this border district next to Myanmar imposes strict measures to curb the Covid-19 pandemic. (Photo by Piyarat Chongcharoen)

The Ministry of Public Health on Wednesday confirmed that two Thai returnees who completed a 14-day quarantine had tested positive for the virus.

Suwannachai Wattanayingcharoenchai, director-general of the Department of Disease Control (DDC), said his staff were still trying to establish where one of the two people, a 35-year-old woman from Loei province, had become infected.

The DDC on Wednesday allowed the second woman, a 34-year-old from Chaiyaphum province, return home. "We found that the virus in her system was decaying and she couldn't transmit the disease," he said.

Dr Suwannachai insisted the Chaiyaphum woman had been infected overseas. However, the CDC has detained the woman from Loei for monitoring at Ramathibodi Hospital and sent health officials to her home to check whether she had been infected locally and might have passed on the disease to anyone else.

Both women had been working in the United Arab Emirates, taken Covid-19 tests and completed their  14-day state quarantine on their return home, he said. However, both took a second test this month when they went to Ramathibodi Hospital to get a Covid-19 health certificate to fly overseas.

 

The Chaiyaphum woman had her first Covid-19 test on her return home on June 5 and the outcome showed an "inconclusive" result, meaning there was a minimal amount of virus in her body. The second test showed she was free of the virus, so she was allowed to go home. It was on Aug 13 that she visited Ramathibodi Hospital to get her health certificate to fly overseas, which at this time returned a positive result.

The second woman returned to Thailand on June 24 and stayed in state quarantine for 14 days, when two lab tests indicated she had no virus, so she went home to Loei. The woman drove to Bangkok on Sunday and visited the hospital at midday to get her Covid-19 health certificate allowing her to work overseas -- but this time her test was positive.

She is now being closely monitored in hospital, but has shown no signs of having a fever.

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Vocabulary

  • decaying (adj): gradually being destroyed by natural causes or by not being cared for - เน่าเปื่อย
  • detained: kept in a place and not allowed to leave - กักตัว ควบคุมตัวหรือฝากขัง
  • establish: to discover, prove, or decide that something is true - พิสูจน์, แสดงให้เห็น
  • fever: an abnormally high body temperature - ไข้
  • inconclusive: not leading to a definite decision or result - ซึ่งไม่มีผลสรุปที่แน่ชัด
  • minimal: very small in amount - น้อยที่สุด, น้อยมาก
  • quarantine (noun): a situation in which a person or animal that might have a disease is kept separate from other people or animals so that they do not catch the disease - การกักบริเวณ, การจำกัดบริเวณ
  • test positive: to show in a medical test that a particular virus, bacteria, disease or drug is present in the body - ตรวจพบว่าติดเชื้อ
  • transmit (verb): when a spread a disease spreads from one person or animal to another, to pass on a disease or infection to another - ถ่าย

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