Taunggyi Township will soon not have enough medical staff to treat and test for COVID-19 if the outbreak continues in southern Shan State. The health department reported 131 active infections on December 15.

“We’ll need more medical staff if cases keep rising in Taunggyi,” Dr Moe Tun, responsible for Taunggyi Township Public Health Department, told SHAN. Under normal circumstances they have enough personnel, he said, but during the pandemic their human resources are stretched.

It’s not just the hospitals that feel the squeeze, the 13 quarantine centers in Shan State’s capital, Taunggyi, where there’s about 650 people, are filling up.

“When it is necessary, we’ll build more quarantine centers, but we’ll need more medical staff,” said Dr Moe Tun. For every person needing isolation, they must also quarantine their entire family, he explained. Further, everyone is tested for the virus on the third and eleventh day of their quarantine, and there’s only eight medical staff available to take tissue samples. Despite this, about 500 people in quarantine have already been tested.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, 437 cases have been counted in southern Shan State. There were 141 cases reported in northern Shan State and 125 cases in eastern Shan State.

In Burma, there were 110,667 confirmed cases on December 16, while 89,418 recovered and 2,319 died.