Mayor asks for coordination on returning OFWs

By Dolly Yasa

BACOLOD City – Mayor Evelio Leonardia asked the national Inter-Agency Task Force on the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATFMEID) for proper coordination in the repatriation of stranded Bacoleños and Negrenses.

In a letter addressed to Cabinet Secretary and IATFMEID member Karlo Nograles, Leonardia said he and Negros Occidental Governor Eugenio Jose Lacson were surprised to hear the news that a boatload of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) will arrive today, April 27, 2020.

44 OFWs were bound for Negros Occidental and 58 for Bacolod City, as authorized by Secretary Carlito G. Galvez, Jr., Chief Implementer for COVID-19 National Action Plan.

“We were also informed that more are arriving soon after,” Leonardia added.

He said the news “considerably messed up the City’s own coordination with the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) on the scheduling of repatriation trips for Bacolod OFWs.”

“We thought the OWWA was the proper agency to work with. Now, we do not know if the batch of Bacolod OFWs that OWWA is ready to process is the same or different from those supposedly arriving on April 27 and thereafter,” the mayor said.

Leonardia also said he and Lacson have discussed the matter and the governor was supposed to co-sign the letter as a joint statement, however, he was in San Carlos City.

The mayor said he and the governor are asking that “before the IATFMEID or any government agency or official issues an authority for any transport by land, sea or air to bring home OFWs to Negros Occidental and/or Bacolod City, there should be prior coordination with both of them.”

He also said that both Negros Occidental and Bacolod City, as destinations of these OFWs, “shall be given the chance to first agree on how many of these OFWs it can accept at any point in time before any land, sea or air transport is arranged for them by government authorities in Manila (this is, in fact, the current operating procedure).”

“Both the Province of Negros Occidental and Bacolod City shall have the right to impose their own health protocols on these OFWs as they arrive in the Province or the City regardless of previous health protocols that they may have already gone through before taking the final leg of their journey home; and that these returning OFWs need to give their prior conformity to these local health protocols first before they will be approved by Manila authorities to become part of the batch for any scheduled trip home,” Leonardia said.

He added that “while the Province of Negros Occidental and Bacolod City understand that these OFWs have to come home sooner or later, the matter of space availability at our various existing quarantine centers in the Province and in the City must be considered first in making any decision thereon.”

Both LGUs have mutually agreed that any arriving OFW shall undergo a mandatory 14-day quarantine at government-managed facilities and a round of RT-PCR swab tests as minimum health protocols “even if these OFWs may have already completed these procedures somewhere else before arriving within our territorial jurisdictions.”

“These protocols were established from hard lessons learned in the past weeks,” the mayor said.

Leonardia said that “while you mentioned the option of home quarantine for these OFWs who should have already tested negative of the virus and given health clearances by the time they board the transport for their repatriation to us, both Governor Lacson and I would prefer to err on the side of caution.”

He added that “the possibility of infection in the interim period or during transit after health clearances have been issued cannot be discounted,” thus, “we have agreed that we cannot allow home quarantine as an option because of its inherent danger to the OFWs’ own families and the general community.”

“We must also reserve space in our quarantine centers for those already in our community who may suddenly become ‘high risk’ PUMs (persons under monitoring) because they were classified as close contacts of people who have become positive of the virus, and these new PUMs have to be taken out of their homes and placed in quarantine centers to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in their neighborhoods. ” he pointed out.

Leonardia also said that “these considerations, therefore, limit our capacity to receive any number of OFWs at any time because they first have to spend 14 days in quarantine at government facilities before they will be allowed to finally go home.”

He added that presently, the province and the city are categorized as low-risk areas in the country.

However, Leonardia said “this is not to say, that our infection incidents are, indeed, low.  This, we believe, is only because we have no capability for mass testing yet because Negros Island has no DOH (Department of Health) bio-laboratory to supplement the testing capacity of the lone bio-lab for Region 6 in Iloilo City. ”

The possibility then of these OFWs increasing the population of infected people cannot be cavalierly dismissed, Leonardia said.