Bacolod mayor appeals city’s quarantine status

By Dolly Yasa 

 

BACOLOD City – Mayor Evelio Leonardia has reiterated his appeal to the National Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases (NIATF-EID) to ease the community quarantine status of this city from General Community Quarantine (GCQ) to a more permissive Modified GCQ starting Dec 1, 2020.

Leonardia’s appeal was jointly endorsed in a resolution by the Regional IATF and the Regional Task Force to the NIATF.

Leonardia said that the city has met all the criteria for de-escalation.

In a letter to the national IATF through Health Secretary Francisco Duque, the mayor cited the continuous decline of coronavirus disease 2019 or COVID-19 cases in the past few weeks.

As of Nov 27, Bacolod City logged 13 new cases.

The total number of active cases is 273 while recoveries numbered 4,909 and 162 deaths out of the 5,344 confirmed cases.

Leonardia further said that the 2-week growth rate of COVID-19 cases in the city was 24.6 percent, which is considered low, while the average daily attack rate is down to 2.96 percent from 5.32 percent two weeks ago.

The mayor also said that the city government has successfully implemented COVID-19 surveillance testing in the three major public markets and the slaughterhouse as well as  members of the Barangay Health Emergency Response Teams (BHERTS) , workers in the food industry, and city government employees serving as frontliners.

He said the surveillance tests yielded a positivity rate of .84 percent with 47 confirmed cases out of 5,581 persons tested.

Leonardia also said that 31 of the 61 Bacolod barangays, or 49.1 percent, were COVID-free for the last 14 days, a 78 percent improvement from last month.