The Department of Health 7 reported on Friday, Aug. 13, 2021, 50 Covid-related deaths in Cebu, including the highly urbanized cities. The number was 40 on Monday and on Tuesday, and 45 each on Wednesday and Thursday. If, God forbid, this upward trend continues, more than 6,000 Cebuano lives will be lost to the coronavirus in the 137 days between today and yearend. That’s probably more than the number of Cebuanos killed during World War II.
Of the 50 deaths reported the other day, 35 came from the province. Many of them probably died in hospitals in Cebu City. We can imagine how many more have died in the towns whose deaths have been unreported because their bodies were buried immediately by their relatives.
Unlike last year when the province was left almost unscathed by the Covid-19 surge that ravaged Cebu City and its two neighboring highly urbanized cities, the pandemic has been unsparing this time. It is a cause for concern that no one can and should minimize.
Meanwhile, in Cebu City where the situation is just as bad, if not worse, we’re waiting for Acting Mayor Michael Rama to show us that he can handle the pandemic better than Mayor Edgar Labella. Last year, Rama was overly critical of Labella’s management of the city’s response to the crisis.
I do not believe that it was because he wanted his mayor to fail. He just happened to have other ideas that he thought were better. When, for example, Labella submitted a proposed ordinance penalizing violators of the stay-at-home order, the City Council of which Rama was the presiding officer, sat on it because he said he believed in friendly persuasion.
As it turned out, both the ordinance -- which the council eventually passed -- and friendly persuasion did not work. It was only when the military and the police deployed armored personnel carriers and heavily armed troops and policemen in the streets, that the people stayed in their homes as ordered.
Rama also did not agree on the establishment of a hospital-like quarantine center at the North Reclamation Area, saying that it was too expensive. To prove his point, he built the Noah Complex inside an unused building at the SRP. Both served their purpose.
The most notable accomplishment that I can credit Rama with so far in the fight against Covid was the conversion of the Cebu City Sports Center into a quarantine center even if it came at the cost of evicting the people for whom the CCSC was built mostly through the efforts of then Mayor Tomas Osmeña and Councilor Joy Young.
He has been at the forefront of the vaccination campaign too, but it cannot be considered an accomplishment until majority of Cebu City residents who are eligible for vaccination have been inoculated. He has to badger the national government to allocate more vaccines to the city for that to happen.
His biggest challenge is how to make the Cebu City Medical Center fully operational. Not only is it long overdue, the need has become more urgent. I think Rama has not wavered in his belief in friendly persuasion, but if it does not work, he should start kicking ass, if you’ll pardon the language. We need for hospital beds, it’s as simple as that.