LOCAL officials have been bandying about the recent rise in the number of coronavirus cases in Cebu City. Not that it should surprise anyone.
But to those who thought the end to the pandemic was near because the number of patients was steadily dropping in the lead-up to the Christmas holiday, this is a reality check.
And I don’t care what Inter-Agency Task Force for the Visayas chief implementer Ret. Gen. Melquiades Feliciano said on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021, the jump in the number of active cases from 93 on Dec. 30, 2020 to 689 a month later is far from “slight.”
But apparently there’s no need to worry. So I should stop sounding the alarm bells. After all, they have the data. They know what’s going on. If they think everything is okay, that the situation is manageable, who am I to argue?
But I can’t help but react to the figures released by the Department of Health (DOH) 7 and the city’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC).
I mean, what a difference a month makes, right?
The City Government had announced that it would distribute the incentive to barangays that did not report cases since November. And almost every day, the public was being told that the number of barangays that had not reported any transmission in the last 14 days was going up.
Authorities even shut down most of the barangay isolation centers as well as the quarantine facility at the former Sacred Heart School for Boys on Gen. Maxilom Ave. for lack of patients.
The DOH 7, too, regularly reassured the public that the region’s Covid critical care utilization (CCU) rate was “safe.”
By the way, to those who still don’t know what CCU is, it refers to the number of intensive care units, isolation beds and ventilators in use in different health and medical facilities for Covid patients.
While this was going on, Mayor Edgardo Labella and City Councilor Joel Garganera, deputy chief implementer of the city’s EOC, kept reminding residents not to let their guard down.
Don’t be complacent, they said. Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is still very much around, they said, which made me wonder why the City Government and the IATF allowed the public to attend dawn masses in December even though the Cebu City Police Office had asked them to reconsider because it was afraid there would be a resurgence.
I guess there lies one of the reasons authorities appear to be nonchalant about the current development. They can’t well act panicky and impose draconian measures to address the problem because they know they are partly responsible.
Think about it.
Mind you, I am saying “partly” because residents who blatantly ignored and continue to ignore health protocol are also very much to blame.
So if the situation doesn’t improve in the next few days, well, residents of Cebu City may as well prepare for the worse. Although, there shouldn’t be any problem. After all, they already know the drill.