Workers from GCQ areas in province must register at WeTrace before getting travel pass

Minglanilla Mayor Elanito Peña wants all municipal employees to be tested for COVID-19 after employees from four of its offices tested positive for the virus. CDN Digital photo | Rosalie Abatayo

CEBU CITY, Philippines — Residents of GCQ areas in Cebu province, who are employed in Cebu City, will need to register themselves in the contact tracing application, WeTrace, before they will be issued with a travel pass that will allow them to cross to Cebu City.

On Monday, August 3, 2020, Governor Gwendolyn Garcia met with Mayors Gerald Anthony Gullas Jr. of Talisay City, Joannes Alegado of Consolacion and Elanito Peña of Minglanilla to discuss about the border control measures that the province would impose now that Cebu City was under the same quarantine status as the three local government units.

Talisay City, Minglanilla, and Consolacion, which have the highest count of confirmed cases in the province, remain to be under the general community quarantine (GCQ) classification while the rest of the province is under a more relaxed modified GCQ.

Read more: Talisay City, Minglanilla, Consolacion remain under GCQ

The three LGUs are also the most contiguous to Cebu City which has a total of 9,075 cases of which over 2,900 remain active.

After the meeting with the governor, Peña said they agreed to issue a travel pass to the workers provided that the latter would register themselves on the mobile application to ensure that they would follow the point-to-point destination indicated in the pass.

“Silbi home to work ra gyud ang passes nila nga ihatag namo. Sa previous man gud nga nahitabo nga wala ta nag-control sa workers nato, taas kaayo ang saka sa COVID [cases] nato mao na karon at least, naay pass,” Peña said in an interview.

(Their travel passes will be valid in going to work from their home only. During the last time that we allowed workers to go to Cebu City, we did not impose controls over them and the cases shoot up.  That is why this time, at least we will be regulating them by issuing a pass.)

Read more: Peña wants all Minglanilla town employees tested for COVID-19

Peña said Minglanilla will already start issuing the passes on Monday, August 7.

As of August 2, 2020, Minglanilla has some 396 total confirmed cases with 278 recoveries and 20 deaths, leaving its active cases to drop to only 98.

Last June 26, Cebu province closed its borders to Cebu City following the surge in cases in the towns after momentarily easing the border restriction to Cebu City as the latter was placed under GCQ from June 1 to 15.

In earlier interviews, Governor Garcia said she intended to keep the border restriction even as Cebu City had been downgraded to GCQ./dbs