Cebu City Police Office | contributed photo
CEBU CITY, Philippines — The detention facilities inside the Cebu City Police Office (CCPO) headquarters will remain restricted for at least two weeks or until COVID-19 positive detainees there will be transferred to the Cebu City Jail.
Police Lieutenant Colonel Wilbert Parilla, CCPO deputy director for operations, said that out of the 44 detainees whom they considered as positive detainees an estimated 10 detainees were still at the detention cells.
Parilla said that these detainees were still waiting for their medical certificate which would be needed for the transfer to the Cebu City Jail.
For now, he said those apprehended or arrested during police operations would have to be temporarily detained at the respective police station’s detention cell until after the positive detainees would be transferred and the detention cells of the CCPO would be sanitized.
Parilla estimated this to be at least two weeks from now.
He said he expected the remaining detainees to be transferred within the week and then it would take another week to decontaminate the detention cells.
He said that the decontamination would be done thrice per week in their buildings and offices.
Once they would be done decontaminating the two cells — male and female detention cells —, he said they would still not accept newly arrested individuals for one more week.
Last Thursday, August 19, Police Lieutenant Colonel Janette Rafter, operations chief of CCPO, confirmed that there were at least 22 detainees who contracted the COVID-19 virus there.
Parilla has recently said that they already considered the other 22 detainees as positive, considering that they were placed in the same area with the other 22 positive detainees.
He said this would bring the number of infected detainees to 44.
Due to this, the visitation of detainees has been suspended until further notice.
Aside from the positive detainees, Parilla also said that as of today, August 30, five CCPO personnel tested positive for the virus.
He, however, said that the five infected policemen were asymptomatic and had already been isolated.
He also said that these policemen had already been vaccinated.
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