Cebu lawmaker suggests 'localized quarantine'

CEBU City Second District Representative Rodrigo Abellanosa appealed to the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases to employ a staggered lifting of the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) by implementing a localized quarantine instead.

"This enhanced community quarantine has brought together the clashing issues on controlling the spread of the Covid-19 virus, the resultant massive unemployment, public health and nutrition consequences, and the inadequacies of the government to feed millions of people. This proposal humbly offers a partial win-win solution. Instead of bugging ourselves with the issue on whether to lift or not to lift the ECQ, may I propose a staggered lifting of ECQ by concurrently transforming it into localized lockdowns or local quarantines," he said.

Localized quarantine, for Abellanosa, means declaring lockdowns by "barangays or clusters or puroks or sitios; and by employment communities such as construction, food production, food processing, manufacturing, call centers, building maintenance and the like."

He also proposed that food deliveries and public transportation must be allowed to operate but only within the local quarantines.

"Proper authorities must persuade supermarkets, big grocery stores, and food wholesalers to hire out-of-town drivers, cashiers, and baggers and to lease standby jeepneys, trucks and buses to set up mobile stores in local quarantines," he said.

"This will minimize the confusion and problems arising from the issuance of quarantine passes for people to access stores outside of the local quarantines," he added.

He also said that police and law enforcers must actively discourage residents from going out of their local quarantines "in order to effectively contact and isolate the local quarantines from each other, except for health and medical reasons and the delivery of government aids but also ensure the unhampered/unimpeded movement of all food and or non-food cargoes."

"We understand the public health and safety is the foremost concern of the government. But we need to come up with more creative solutions to containing this disease while ensuring that our people continue to have access to and afford basic necessities," Abellanosa said. (PR)