THE Sarawak Health Department will heighten surveillance on the state’s two detention depots for illegal immigrants and six prisons after 99 detainees at the Semuja detention depot in Serian were infected by Covid-19.

The Semuja depot currently holds 463 detainees who are awaiting deportation.

The other depot is in Bekenu in Miri, which at present holds 521 detainees.

The six prisons are at Puncak Borneo, Kuching with 1,210 inmates, Sri Aman (407), Sibu (559), Miri (566), Limbang (428) and the Bintulu correctional centre (290).

The infections at the Semuja depot was declared a new Covid-19 cluster today, and is one of two new clusters reported in the state.

Both make up nearly a third of the state’s 303 new cases.

Deputy Chief Minister Douglas Uggah Embas in a media conference on the pandemic situation in the state said screening of all the detainees and Immigration Department officers manning the Semuja depot was ordered after the Serian Department of Health office received information that a detainee was found positive.

The detainee was deported via the Tebedu international entry point – 64km from Kuching – last Thursday.

Uggah, who chairs the state disaster management committee, said the first round of tests on 584 detainees and officers carried out Tuesday and yesterday has so far found the infection among the detainees only and not the officers.

He said 185 were tested negative while the result for 300 others are not completed yet.

The infected detainees have been separated from the other detainees and kept in isolation in one part of the depot which has been turned into a low-level infection centre (PKRC) managed by the Health Department.

The state’s other new cluster is a community cluster involving a longhouse at Sg Atap in Meradong in central Sarawak.

Uggah said the infection was spread by inter-district travel with the source of the infection, a 36-year-old Sibu woman who had made the 40km trip to reach home.

On her return to Sibu, she was ordered by her employer to get tested at the Lanang health clinic on March 3 and was found to be positive two days later.

In the follow up active case detection, 18 people, out of 148 that were tested, were found positive for the infection.

The two new clusters bring the number in the state to 34. – March 18, 2021.