Quarantine status appeal ‘not a priority’ for city

By Joseph B.A. Marzan

 

Despite the continuing downtrend in new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases, Iloilo City’s COVID-19 Task Force spokesperson said Friday that appealing the city’s current General Community Quarantine (GCQ) status hasn’t been in their sights.

Data from the Iloilo City Government’s Operations Center indicated that only 8 new COVID-19 cases were recorded in the city as of 12 pm of Nov. 6, 2020.

This continues a trend of lower number of new cases in the city throughout the first week of November, which started in the waning days of October.

Iloilo City COVID-19 Task Force spokesperson Jeck Conlu told Aksyon Radyo Iloilo that the downtrend was a good sign for the city’s aggressive testing and contact tracing efforts.

The city government has sought the assistance of the Department of Interior and Local Government, the Philippine National Police, and the barangays in contact tracing.

He cautioned, however, that the city isn’t winding down its measures any time soon.

“Our cases went down in the first week of November and the last few days of October. It means that there is a significant downtrend in additional cases compared in October, and we can see that there is a significant drop. We have gone through two days where we had single digits for a day. But when you look at it, the city is not complacent in responding to our daily cases,” Conlu said.

Conlu also reiterated that the city government isn’t focused on appealing its GCQ status.

The city has been under GCQ since Oct. 1.

He said that the city government’s focus is maintaining the downtrend and eventually arresting the spread of COVID-19 in the city.

“We haven’t discussed [appealing] with the COVID Team and Mayor Jerry Treñas, that we would be appealing. Our focus right now is to maintain [the low number of COVID-19 cases] and arrest the rise in daily COVID cases. Hopefully for the whole month of November, it wouldn’t return to levels of cases where we average more than 50 cases a day,” Conlu added.

He also addressed the discrepancies in data reported between the Department of Health’s (DOH) central office in Manila and the city government.

Iloilo City Mayor Jerry Treñas previously wrote to DOH Secretary Francisco Duque III to seek for explanation regarding this matter.

Conlu said that they were still awaiting the official response from Manila but added that these discrepancies made them worried.

He also clarified that the city government’s data is now matched with that of the DOH-Western Visayas Center for Health Development (DOH-WV CHD).

“We’re also worried about that because we project it differently, where in fact we’ve already perfected [our data] and we’ve been able to match. If you’re from Iloilo and you hear the news because it goes out in the national news, the national newspapers. Hopefully they rectify this already so it would be fair for us in the city,” he said.