Malilong: Where the City ‘failed’

Malilong: Where the City ‘failed’

CEBU City accounts for a little over 10 percent of the total number of Covid-19 cases in the country. That’s scary. People are asking what went wrong and what the other cities and provinces, which have much lower incidents of Covid-19, have done that we haven’t.

I think I know what went wrong and people like me are partly to blame for it. You see, when the first few Covid-19 cases were detected in Cebu City, I was one of those who noisily demanded that we should already start testing our residents for the coronavirus. Our reason was simple: We can’t battle an invisible enemy blind-folded.

We demanded to know why we had to wait for between one to two weeks to get the results of our swabs from the already overloaded Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) in Muntinlupa if we could do the processing on our own. Each day wasted was an added window for the virus to spread.

It turned out that the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center already had a laboratory in place then but it had to secure the approval of the Department of Health before it could operate. And the test kits were hard to come by because there was not enough supply to meet the demands of countries all over the world scrambling for means to contain the rapidly spreading pandemic.

Luckily for us, Mayor Edgar Labella had an ally in OPAV Secretary Mike Dino to pull strings in Manila and secure the test kits. So when the Sotto laboratory received accreditation as a sub-national laboratory after its first test results were validated by the RITM, we were good to go.

Our “failure” therefore was not that we did not do what the others did but that we did what they did not do: testing. I was told that more than 80 percent of our positive cases were asymptomatic. They had no cough, no fever nor other signs of the disease. They were likely to get cured without them ever knowing that they were infected but they were a risk to the elderly, especially those with pre-existing health condition like diabetes or heart or lung disease.

Note that while the national case fatality rate stands at six percent, Cebu City’s is only .05 (or one-half) percent. If we had been less aggressive in testing our people for the coronavirus and simply waited for critical patients to show up at the hospital, the number of cases would have been much lower than the current one thousand plus. But then there probably would have been more deaths as the health-compromised had less protection from being infected by the asymptomatic.

So there you are, don’t just look at the number of “positives.” Also check how many of them have died. Only then can you get a clear sense of what is happening and maybe, that would stop you from ranting in your panic that your government has hung you out to dry.

At the same time, the government should do a better job at reassuring the people that they are on top of the situation. This is not an indictment of Labella because he is not expected to micromanage the campaign against the coronavirus but he should ask the people to whom he has delegated the execution of the details to stop quarreling.

The last that we need to happen is for people to perceive that City Hall is a house divided. Every functionary should speak with one voice; he or she should learn to work with the others as a team. Anyone who does not understand or is unwilling to do that should rethink his or her relevance in the overall scheme of the Covid-19 battle and quit.

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