THE Cebu City Government needs to get its act together.
Its handling of the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic has been a story of highs and lows that is marked with much confusion.
Granted, the City is used to handling natural disasters and not a virus that is highly infectious and potentially deadly. Still, the City should make better use of the information it has, considering it controls the narrative.
The Department of Health-Central Visayas (DOH 7) already explained the discrepancies in the number of cases released by local chief executives and those reflected on the national Covid-19 tracker.
The increasing testing capacity of the sub-national laboratory at the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center (VSMMC) in Cebu City and the large coverage of contact tracing teams have resulted in a large number of results.
To validate and to verify the data, the DOH 7 delays the release of official Covid-19 figures.
According to SunStar Cebu reporter Wenilyn B. Sabalos’ report, the delay provides enough time for the official DOH Covid-19 tracker to be updated to reflect numbers in different parts of the country.
However, local government units are given real time data that they can release to the public and to the media, Sabalos’ report said.
That would explain conflicting reports.
In the case of the Cebu City Government, that might even shed light on why the City Health Department (CHD) would have different numbers than the Office of the Mayor, which hints of a lack of coordination between the two.
Then on Thursday, May 7, a Covid-19 patient from Barangay Luz said he was surprised when City Administrator Floro Casas Jr. told the City Council the day before that about 100 of them would be released because they had tested negative.
How could that be, he said, when they were only swabbed for the first time since they were quarantined on Thursday?
Casas said he was only passing information given to him by the CHD.
Of course, the patient is not a doctor and the CHD might have just jumped to a conclusion since all the quarantined patients did not display any symptoms.
It still doesn’t change the fact that Cebu City needs to stop being seen as a purveyor of fake news.