Cebu City has breached the 2,000-mark again in COVID-19 infections while its top officials bicker. |CDN Digital file photo
CEBU CITY, Philippines — Cebu City, which was once praised for beating the peak of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in 2020, has once again reached over 2,000 active cases of the disease as of February 6, 2021.
The city managed to reach this count in the first 37 days of 2021, merely three months after it has successfully contained its COVID-19 situation.
Visayas chief implementor for the Interagency Task Force (IATF), General Melquiades Feliciano, recently made a statement to the City Council that the city government failed to control this spike of cases in the city as the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) had staffing problems at the start of the year.
He said that because of the low trend in cases at the end of 2020, the EOC has relieved most of their staff and the workers returned to their original posts in the barangays and isolation centers naturally decreasing the staff of the center.
The sudden rise of cases at the start of 2021 was not managed well causing backlogs in the extraction of cases, the filling up of isolation centers, and the difficulty to control the spread of the virus.
The EOC, however, still attributes the rise in the cases to the movement of the people with the reopened economy, the “private gatherings” such as parties during the holiday season, and the general behavior of the public being complacent against health protocols.
Yet the Department of Health in Central Visayas (DOH-7) is already thinking beyond these reasons and has requested the Philippine Genome Center (PGC) to test the variant of COVID-19 in the city to see if the virus has mutated.
The DOH-7 has noted that while the virus has been spreading quickly and has even infected children, the number of deaths remain low and the number of patients reaching critical care is minimal.
With this trend, the DOH-7 sent 70 samples to the PGC for variant identification from various patients such as children, reinfected individuals, newly infected individuals, groups infected together, and samples from each age group.
The DOH also confirmed the entry of the UK variant of the COVID-19 in Cebu with a patient who was hospitalized in Cebu City shortly after arriving from Dubai on January 17, 2021. The patient has recovered and is now home in Talisay City.
However, the DOH-7 said that the rise in cases cannot be attributed to this particular patient because he was immediately isolated upon arrival and exposure to other people was minimal.
Still, Mayor Edgardo Labella said the entry of the new variant into the city is a wake-up call to intensify the implementation of health protocols.
“New variant or old variant, we must be vigilant. We have to adhere to the health protocols,” said the mayor in a phone conference on February 6, 2021.
Amid the rising cases, the city is also facing a political tug of war between its chief executive and vice.
Vice Mayor Michael Rama publicly expressed his disappointment over how Mayor Labella has managed the COVID-19 situation in the city and urged him to take time off if he can’t handle the city’s affairs while recuperating in his home.
The mayor, for his part, responded that even if he is working from home, he has managed to oversee the operations of the City Hall.
While, its leaders bicker, Cebu City has once again found itself at square one of the COVID-19 pandemic with the cases growing higher and the recoveries barely keeping up. /rcg