BACK AND FORTH: Iloilo City seeks reversal to GCQ

By Joseph B.A. Marzan

 

Just a day after it implemented the stricter Modified Enhanced Community Quarantine (MECQ) status, Iloilo City today, Sept. 28, 2020, will seek to return to the more permissive General Community Quarantine (GCQ) amid consistent reports of new cases of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the city.

The city’s MECQ status was originally slated to run until Oct. 9, but the City Hall said it will now seek the approval of the Inter-Agency Task Force on the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-MEID) to return to GCQ.

The return to GCQ was first reported in a press release posted by the city government on Saturday to the official Facebook page of its COVID-19 Emergency Operations Center.

The IATF-MEID approved the city government’s request for the MECQ status via Resolution No. 74, which was released to the media evening of Sept. 24.

The city government said that relaxing the CQ status was a concession made by the city’s COVID-19 Team and the city’s business sector Saturday morning.

The COVID-19 Team is a group of medical doctors from both private and public medical facilities in the city who advice the mayor on the health-related aspects of the pandemic.

The GCQ proposal was attributed to the lower number of new COVID-19 cases in several villages which were placed on either surgical or total lockdown.

Iloilo City Mayor Jerry Treñas said that despite the lower number of cases in those villages, compliance officers will be deployed to monitor observance of health protocols.

“Compliance officers will be deployed to affected barangays. A Quick Response Team will be on lookout to trace, test, isolate and decontaminate areas with Covid-19 cases,” Treñas said in the press release.

The mayor said that he already talked with the National Task Force Against COVID-19 (NTF) Chairperson, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana and Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) Undersecretary for Operations Epimaco Densing about the shift in protocols.

The press release stated that the letter was to be sent over the weekend, but Treñas told Daily Guardian on Sunday via text message that the letter was still with Atty. GV Cuñada of the City Legal Office.

The mayor assured that the city will still receive returning residents as long as they would have negative results from their Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests.

“We can accept flights of returning residents as long as their RT-PCR tests have been taken within 72 hours. Personnel will be assigned at the airport and seaport to check on their documents. We will then inform their barangays to monitor them. They can go home directly as no more quarantine in facility shall be required,” he added.

He added that there will also be random RT-PCR testing for city hall employees every week, and suggested the same for the Iloilo City Fish Port Complex and the business sector.

 

TOUGH CONSIDERATIONS

Iloilo City’s COVID-19 Task Force spokesperson and Public Safety and Transportation Management Office (PSTMO) head Jeck Conlu told Aksyon Radyo Iloilo on Saturday that moving to the MECQ and back to the GCQ was “difficult”.

“Although our cases on Friday went down slightly, the bulk of the discussion was to consider the living or the daily livelihood of the people here in the city. It was difficult to decide because there are a lot of considerations, but we hope the people understand that we are weighing everything to adjust and check the needs of the different sectors as well as our needs. We cannot evolve to [a status] where everything stops,” Conlu said.

Conlu added that balance between the economy and the health care system is necessary, citing the “domino effect” where the economy cannot recover despite a stabilizing downtrend of COVID-19 cases. This scenario might also become another health problem.

“We need to balance health and our [local] economy. Otherwise, we’ll see that the trend of [COVID-19] cases is getting better, but our economy gets bogged down, and it will be difficult for us to recover. It will also boil down to another health problem, because then we’ll run out of resources to spend,” he added.

He added that the city government would finalize protocols for the barangays and the private sector by Sunday for a ‘new normal of the new normal’.

“We’ll be from four to five days under MECQ by Monday. Many test results have come out, I think more than 50 percent have been released, and majority have yielded negative results. When we return by Monday, we’ll have different work protocols within City Hall and private offices. This will be released by the COVID-19 Team by Sunday, and the same will be applied to our barangays. We will finalize things by Sunday and we will download them to the barangays and our private sector and government agencies and offices on Monday, so it will be like a ‘new normal of the new normal’,” he said.

As of this writing, there are no updates from the city government on the protocols.