‘Copied’ anti-COVID-19 schemes launched today

By Dolly Yasa

 

BACOLOD City – The city government of Bacolod is set to launch today, Sept 29, 2020, two schemes it has copied from Cebu and South Cotabato in a bid to arrest the spread of the coronavirus disease in the city which has gone beyond the 3,000-case mark.

The first scheme aims to further intensify contact tracing operations through the South Cotabato COVID Contact Tracing System (SC-CCTS).

City Administrator and EOC executive director Em Ang said the adopted system will be called “Bacolod City COVID-19 Contact Tracing (BaC-Trac)”

She said Bacolod is adopting the SC-CCTS as its online contact tracing system to record the movement of residents around Bacolod City and elsewhere in the province and to easily locate people suspected of having contact with COVID-19 patients.

BaC-Trac is a localized web-based and mobile-based application developed for the efficient and expeditious contact tracing of confirmed COVID-19 positive patients, Ang explained.

Bacolod residents will be issued a BaC-Trac card which bears the holder’s name, address, identification number and a uniquely assigned Quick Response (QR) code through online registration.

Those who do not reside in Bacolod and have temporary personal or business transactions in the City or who may have to report for work daily will be issued a BaC-Trac visitor’s card.

The cards will serve as a digital logbook when entering government premises or private establishments for the purpose of recording the date and time of entry of visit through scanning of the QR code upon entry.

Meanwhile, business and government establishments are required to download the mobile application CCTS Logger on Google store to be able to scan BaC-Trac cards.

The second scheme adopted by the city is the  “One Hospital Command Center (OHCC)” – one of the best practices of Cebu City when it was trying to curb the spread of COVID-19 at the height of cases there.

This is a centralized hospital command center for better management and use of information from Bacolod hospitals on COVID-19 cases, the Public Information Office of Bacolod said in a press statement.

The OHCC includes a call center manned by agents for tele-consultation and education.

Teams under this center are also deployed to coordinate hospital admissions and out-of-town hospital transfers as well as manage medical transport and data analytics.