Editorial: Another failing
JUST as how we expected things to be, an overseer’s presence in Cebu City will shed light on where the weak links are in the city’s management of the health crisis.
Inter-Agency Task Force Deputy Chief Implementer Maj. Gen. Melquiades Feliciano reveals another deficiency—Cebu City’s snail-paced contact tracing.
The City Government might have been too shy to pronounce it out loud, but this was apparently the back story why Police Regional Office 7 Chief Albert Ignatius Ferro had to invite over Baguio City Mayor Benjamin Magalong to share their winning ways in contact tracing operations. The mayor had brought along a team to train Cebu City’s contact tracers.
Before the sharing of notes, Cebu City had only 35 teams, way short of its objective of 80, said Cebu City Mayor Edgardo Labella.
Cebu City’s current edition of the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) supposedly ends on July 15. Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu, appointed Cebu overseer, earlier said he wanted to open Cebu City. Feliciano, however, doesn’t feel comfy about it, and he should know. He doesn’t want an ECQ lift unless “appropriate measures to control the spread of infections are in place.”
Last week, he had hoped the city could finally launch its full deployment of contact tracing teams on Sunday, July 12, 2020.
Feliciano said a number of Covid-19 positives were not dealt with accordingly, and thus infections continue to spread.
“If there’s a proactive contact tracing, you do not wait for the patient to go to you or to the cluster clinics. You’re supposed to be the one looking for the suspected and probable (Covid-19 patients),” the deputy chief implementer said. Cebu City’s current data, he said, only represent 20 to 25 percent of the real situation on the ground.
Feliciano said they aim to get to the bottom of the transmissions in 20 barangays with the highest number of Covid-19 cases by Thursday, July, 16.
To recall, the tri-city mass rapid antibody testing in May had exceeded its target, testing 115.79 percent of the target population, according to the Department of Health Central Visayas. The turnout would have provided a perfect complement had contact tracing been done sufficiently.
Feliciano also pointed out lapses of the Cebu City’s emergency operations center (EOC), saying it lacked communication with barangays and other government agencies.
“There are gray areas from coordination of the barangays with the EOC. The EOC is not connected with Cesu (City Epidemiology and Surveillance Unit), Resu (Regional Epidemiological and Surveillance Unit)... When that happens, they’re now on the loose and (have) no control of monitoring,” said Feliciano in a SunStar report.
The IATF had done a pretty good job in pointing out these weaknesses in our part of the world, and to them we throw much gratitude.