Bacolod Mayor Evelio Leonardia is again appealing to the national Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases to de-escalate the status of Bacolod City from General Community Quarantine to Modified General Community Quarantine starting December 1.
“We have met all the criteria for de-escalation with the further decline of COVID-19 cases in Bacolod City during the last two weeks,” Leonardia said in a letter sent to Health Secretary Francisco Duque, NIATF chairman, Thursday, November 26.
As of November 24, Bacolod had 258 active COVID-19 cases out of 5,294 accumulated cases, he said.
The total number of recoveries have also reached 4,875 or 92.8 percent, which correlates to good management and treatment of COVID-19 cases, he said.
Based on the Local Government Unit Risk Matrix, Leonardia said the 2-week growth rate of COVID-19 cases in Bacolod City was 24.6 percent, which is considered low, while the average daily attack rate is down to 2.96 percent from 5.32 percent two weeks ago, Leonardia added.
He also told Duque that the city government has successfully implemented COVID-19 surveillance testing in Bacolod’s three major public markets and the slaughterhouse, among members of Barangay Health Emergency Response Teams, workers in the food industry, and city government employees serving as frontliners, which yielded a positivity rate of .84 percent with 47 confirmed cases out of 5,581 persons tested.
Surveillance testing is a continuing effort of the Bacolod City Emergency Operations Center with scheduled testing this weekend targeting the transport sector and food delivery service workers, Leonardia said.
“We are continuing our aggressive contact tracing operations and the full implementation of the Bacolod Contact Tracing System, a localized web and mobile application,” he also said.
He pointed out that as of Thursday 31 out of 61 Bacolod barangays, or 49.1 percent, were Covid-free for the last 14 days, which is a decrease from 78 percent last month.
“We are also working to further expand our healthcare facilities even as the healthcare capacity utilization in all tertiary private and government hospitals in Bacolod is only at 48 percent,” Leonardia said.
Of that number less than half of the patients are from Bacolod City, with the rest coming from Negros Occidental local government units, Leonardia said.
Leonardia said with measures in place vs. COVID-19 he is confident Bacolod City is ready to transition into MGCQ so it can reopen the local economy after an extended lull.*