Mayor Evelio Leonardia is requesting the national government to allocate more vaccines against COVID-19 for Bacolod City amid the continued spike in local cases.
“We are being hit hard by this new wave of COVID-19 infections. Ramping up our vaccination program will be critical to saving lives and restoring economic activity in our city”, Leonardia said in a letter dated May 5 to Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr., chief implementer of the National Task Force for COVID-19.
Galvez early this week said the government might have to prioritize the inoculation of residents in Metro Manila and other key areas of the country hardest hit by the pandemic, including Bacolod City.
The Department of Health has classified Bacolod City as a high risk area for COVID-19.
Bacolod City had 1,061 active COVID-19 cases on Thursday, May 6, City Administrator Em Ang, who is also the executive director of the Emergency Operations Center (EOC), said.
She said Bacolod City had 180 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday and 61 on Thursday.
There has also been a clustering of cases at a BPO office and at a national government agency in Bacolod, Ang said.
Leonardia, in his letter to Galvez, said the number of COVID-19 cases continue to rise in Bacolod City, resulting to increases in hospitalizations and deaths
Hospitals and intensive care units are now nearing their full capacity, and staff shortages have been reported, he said.
The EOC has recorded an alarming increase of 422 percent in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the City, from only 271 cases in March to 1,415 in April, he added.
The increase was recorded despite the fact that Bacolod has some of the strictest policies in place, like mask mandates, capacity limits, liquor ban, curfew, suspension of inbound travel, and alternative work arrangements, among other mitigating measures, he said.
“We have been doing our very best to be ahead in terms of measures to limit the spread of COVID-19. We are also on pace to have more new cases as we continue to intensify contact tracing and expand targeted testing,” the mayor said.
Bacolod was among the very first local government units in the country to secure 650,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines, but these doses won’t be delivered until the third quarter of the year, he said.
“While we have already started to roll out our vaccination program, our allocation from the national government comes in trickles,” the mayor said.
To date, Bacolod has only received 19,160 vaccine doses from the national government, and has only inoculated 11,993 out of its 424,992 residents eligible for vaccination, he added.
“As we are experiencing a sharp increase in new cases and the threat of even faster spread, we need to accelerate the pace of vaccinations to move through the priority groups more quickly,” the mayor said.*