THE Bacolod City Council Wednesday, March 12, declared a state of health emergency outbreak in the city amid coronavirus disease (Covid-19).
Councilor Renecito Novero, majority floor leader, said his motion to declare a state of health emergency in Bacolod was unanimously approved during the regular session of the City Council Wednesday.
He said there were two categories of persons that are supposed to be under direct supervision of the health personnel, the persons under investigation (PUIs) and persons under monitoring (PUMs), for Covid-19.
“We are doing a preventive method. The state of health emergency will justify the city government to utilize our calamity fund for the purposes of addressing the preventive measure against coronavirus,” he added.
Novero noted that among the preventive measures include the providing a containment area or quarantine area where the city can house not the PUIs, which will be confined in a hospital for treatment, but more particularly for the PUMs where they are required to undergo 14-day home quarantine.
“These are people who had travel history or the overseas Filipino workers. When they arrive here, we will require them to stay in the quarantine area and it should be mandatory so that it will be prevented if they have an infection and to avoid contamination of their fellow family members and we don’t want that to happen. Because of one contaminated person it can multiply to jump to another one, two, three persons and so on, so we are very preventive at this point in time,” Novero said.
He said Mayor Evelio Leonardia was also trying to look for some kind of houses or areas to be considered as quarantine area in the city and the city will fund for it.
The city’s PUIs and PUMs have a history of travel from South Korea, Hong Kong, China, Morocco, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, and Thailand.
President Rodrigo Duterte earlier declared a state of public health emergency throughout the Philippines.
Meanwhile, the city council also approved a resolution urging the Department of Education Central Office, Commission of Higher Education (Ched) and Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda) for an early graduation of their students.
The resolution was authored by Novero.