Gwen to IATF: Don’t lump us with HUCs when deciding quarantine status

Cebu Governor Gwendolyn Garcia meets with municipal and city health officers to discuss COVID-19 measures and protocols. | screengrabbed from FB video

CEBU CITY, Philippines — With no response from the national Interagency Task Force (IATF) on the Capitol’s appeal to shift to a modified general community quarantine (MGCQ), the province will have to maintain status quo on its protocols under GCQ at least until June 15, 2020.

Governor Gwendolyn Garcia said the province will have to wait until the IATF officially declares Cebu province under MGCQ.

“As far as the previous IATF resolution is concerned, the GCQ is until June 15. Thereafter, it is presumed that we will move on to MGCQ, unless there is a different assessment of the available data,” Garcia said.

Garcia, however, called on the IATF to distinguish Cebu province from the rest of the highly urbanized cities (HUCs) of Cebu, Mandaue, and Lapu-Lapu when deciding on the quarantine status of the local government units.

“Ang ako lang wish nga we will not be lumped together with other cities pareha sa nahitabo nga gi-GCQ ang ubang mga syudad and the rest of the province. Murag nakalimot to sila nga the province is already under GCQ,” Garcia said.

(My wish is that we will not be lumped together with other cities like what happened when the other cities and the rest of the province was placed under GCQ. They may have forgotten that the province is already under GCQ.)

Garcia said she hopes the appeal of the province would “spell out very clearly” that the province and its component LGUs are separate from the HUCs, including in the reporting of cases.

‘Ready to move on’

The province initially planned to shift to MGCQ and further ease up movement restrictions on Friday, June 12, 2020.

But its appeal, which was submitted last June 1, has not been tackled by the IATF during their meeting last Monday, June 8, and Garcia said she has not been notified yet if it was brought up during the task force’s meeting yesterday, June 10.

Since the middle of May, Garcia has repeatedly pronounced that the province is “ready to move on.”

In her daily press conferences, Garcia has made comparisons on the number of COVID-19 cases in the province, which is now at 324, and other diseases such as dengue, which logged over 1,000 cases in the province in the first half of 2020.

Garcia has also called on the Department of Health to revise its reporting of COVID-19 cases and declare only those that are active cases, meaning patients that have tested positive and currently have symptoms, and not the cumulative total.

Read: Gwen to DOH: Report only ‘active’ cases

She said that reporting the active cases gives a more realistic reflection of the COVID-19 situation in the province as over 130 of the 324 cases here are asymptomatic while 87 have been declared as recovered. /bmjo