ILOILO City Mayor Jerry Treñas has supported the use of Western Visayas Medical Center (WVMC) in Mandurriao district as containment facility for persons under investigation (PUI) for the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV).
Treñas wrote to Department of Health (DOH) Regional Director Dr. Marlyn Convocar on Friday, February 7, relative to the importance of providing PUIs with a containment facility for the purpose of isolation, to minimize spread of infection, monitoring, provision of quality medical care and collection of specimen.
"We strongly recommend WVMC to be designated as containment facility for PUIs. As a tertiary hospital, it complies with minimum requirement set and most importantly, being a DOH retained hospital, resources would be easier to allocate and managed," Treñas said.
"Most of all, spread of infection will be greatly minimized since all cases will be contained in one facility. The City Government signifies its support through human resource and logistic augmentation while continuing its community case finding, persons under monitoring (PUM), PUI referrals and reporting," he added.
Treñas underscored the urgency to provide an appropriate response in terms of hospital bed capacity, well-trained human resource or infection control and management, operational infection control and waste disposal mechanism and adequate logistics.
"Let us work together to contain the spread of this virus and keep Iloilo City safe and healthy," he said. (PR)