CEBU CITY, Philippines — Cebu City Mayor Edgardo Labella said the city government is working to send over 18,000 locally stranded individuals (LSIs) home to their respective hometowns.
Labella said in a press conference on July 21, 2020 that they are waiting for the decision of the national Interagency Task Force (IATF) on the request of the Regional IATF in Central Visayas (RIATF-7) to exempt the LSIs in Cebu City from the travel ban.
The mayor said he is concerned that the LSIs are still stuck in Cebu City, especially since some of them may no longer have a source of income due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
He is also worried of the 11,000 LSIs outside of Cebu City who have yet to come home since the beginning of the community quarantine in March 2020.
Read: 16K LSIs waiting for approval of travel authority applications
The city government is hoping that the LSIs can finally go home whether under the Modified Enhanced Community Quarantine (MECQ) or when the city is downgraded to General Community Quarantine (GCQ).
“Naa tay 18,000 nga LSI nga naa pa sa syudad. Aduna pay 11,000 nga ganahan mosulod. Hinaot if ma GCQ ta, mapagawas na nato sila, mapasulod ang uban. Mao na atong gipaningkamutan,” Labella said.
(There are 18,000 LSIs in the city. There are also 11,000 who want to come in. We hope that if we will be under general community quarantine, we can let others go home and others come back in. That’s what we will work hard for.)
Labella is hoping the city will really be downgraded to GCQ in August so they can begin facilitating the repatriation of the LSIs in the city bring back LSIs who want to come back to Cebu City.
One of the measures the city is intensifying is the contact tracing of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients so that more tests can be conducted and the city can find out the extent of the spread of the virus in the past month.
The contact tracers have been deployed to the barangays with a new system of contact tracing aided by a digital database for faster tracing.
The mayor hopes to increase more the case doubling time of the city, which is now at eight percent, a significant leap from its previous three percent. /bmjo