Cebu City welcomes evaluation from national gov’t

Cebu City Hall | CDN File Photo

CEBU CITY, Philippines — The Cebu City government welcomed the decision of the country’s anti-coronavirus task force to evaluate how the city government had handled the pandemic here.

“That’s their prerogative and we welcome their evaluation… Any help extended would be welcome, and any evaluation we’re going to take is also welcome,” Cebu City Mayor Edgardo Labella told CDN Digital in a phone interview on Sunday, June 21.

The mayor also said they looked forward to the harmonization of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) figures between those released from the City Health Department and the national government.

“And I hope that they are able to make the proper reconciliation of their data and our data on the ground. Of course, I cannot blame them if the data presented to them is not also accurate,” said Labella.

He added that the city government believed experts and authorities from the national government were looking at ‘a different set’ of data pertaining to the COVID-19 cases here, and that they do not match those being produced locally.

If figures from the local government and those from the national were synchronized, Labella said the city would not need to go back to enhanced community quarantine (ECQ), the strictest form of community quarantine.

“If only things were considered including that we have the lowest mortality rate and higher recoveries in the entire country, in addition to the proper data, we think we could have been under GCQ (general community quarantine),” said Labella.

“But then again, it’s (going back to ECQ) their prerogative so we have to abide with it and simply comply with it right now,” he added.

Last Saturday, the Malacañang announced that the National Task Force was instructed to deploy a team to evaluate the responses Cebu City had against the COVID-19 pandemic. The city, with a population of over 1 million and considered as the hub of economic and commercial activities in the Visayas-Mindanao area, was tagged as the epicenter of the outbreak in the region.

The evaluation, according to the most recent resolution issued by the Inter-Agency Task Force for Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF – MEID), will start this Monday, June 22, and will be expected to be up to a week.

Cebu City is the only local government unit (LGU) in the country whose plans to combat COVID-19 will be subjected for review from higher-ups.

Labella said the city government was ready to undergo assessment.

“We are always ready as for as long as the proper data are being presented, together with the city health department and the regional health office (Department of Health in Central Visayas),” Labella said.

READ MORE: National gov’t steps in to evaluate Cebu City’s COVID response

Data reconciliation

The IATF-MEID is also recommending the synchronization of all local, regional, and national numbers pertaining to COVID-19 cases in Cebu.

Cebu City’s Health Department (CHD) reported on June 20 a total of 4,365 COVID-19 cases with 2,092 recoveries, and 73 deaths. This translated to recovery and case-fatality rates at 47.9 percent and 1.7 percent respectively.

On the other hand, the COVID-19 tracker of DOH’s central office showed that Cebu City, albeit the city with the most number of documented coronavirus patients, has 3,546 as of June 20.

In earlier press conferences, both DOH-7 and DOH Central said the discrepancy between the two sets of data was due to the tedious vetting process in which data transmitted from the region would undergo another round of verification before they would be included in the national tally. /dbs