Cebu City needs comprehensive pandemic ‘bounce back’ plan – dad

CEBU CITY, Philippines — Cebu City Councilor Alvin Dizon is asking Mayor Edgardo Labella and Vice Mayor Michael Rama to convene the executive and legislative departments of the city to create a comprehensive recovery plan for the pandemic.

Dizon said that the economic impacts of the pandemic were already being felt here in the city with more businesses slowing and closing down and ordinary Cebuanos going hungry and jobless.

He said that despite Cebu City’s initial gains in slowly reducing its positivity rate in the past weeks, there had always been the risk of a resurgence of cases. 

Read: Positivity rate of Cebu City goes down to 4.1% — Feliciano

“It is projected that it will be a rough road to recovery as it has been seen that trade-offs between economic recovery and health will remain a big challenge to both the private and public sectors,” said the councilor. 

With this, Dizon said there would be a need for the city to be united in formulating a recovery plan for the economy to recover after the pandemic had subsided.

The City Council agreed with him and they passed a resolution urging the mayor to convene both the executive and the legislative departments to plan out what would happen in the new normal where the city would have to co-exist with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

“We request both the Executive and Legislative departments to come together, assess, discuss, plan and formulate a comprehensive bounce-back plan or socio-economic strategy for the City of Cebu taking into important fundamental components such as economic recovery program, public health, inclusive education, support for the poor and other vulnerable groups, fiscal and resource generation measures, among others.”

“We also request the two departments that the formulation of the city’s bounce-back plan or socio-economic strategy must be democratized to include representatives from the civil society organizations (CSOs), who are important stakeholders in our collective effort to rebuild our city back better and more resilient,  sustainable and just,” said Dizon. 

The councilor said he hoped the mayor would heed the council’s request so that the city could finally see a concrete blueprint on how to live after the pandemic./dbs