Why only Cebu City shifts to Alert Level 1? DOH-7 exec explains
Parts of Cebu City’s business district are seen in this photo taken on September 26, 2020. CDN Digital photo | Brian J. Ochoa
CEBU CITY, Philippines — Except for Cebu City, the rest of the island needs improvement in terms of its COVID-19 immunization coverage rates if it wants to shift to the most relaxed form of quarantine classification, a local health official explained.
Dr. Mary Jean Loreche, the chief pathologist of the Department of Health in Central Visayas (DOH-7), said the cities of Lapu-Lapu and Mandaue fell short in vaccinating 80 percent of their senior citizens.
Cebu province is also facing the same challenge. But on top of this, they have yet to achieve the target of inoculating 70 percent of the eligible population, said Loreche.
“There are 4 requirements in the metrics that IATF use in the de-escalation for the alert levels (for this purpose, from Alert Level 2 to 1),” Loreche said.
She pointed to caseload which refers to the number of active infections, capacity utilization rate among hospitals and isolation facilities, and reaching the targets of inoculating 70 percent of the eligible population, and 80 percent of the sub-priority group A2 or senior citizens.
“For Lapu-Lapu City, they satisfied the three requirements, it is still short on the A2. Mandaue also satisfied all three requirements and for data reconciliation for A2 and hopefully, they can be reconsidered,” explained Loreche.
“(For) Cebu province, it has satisfied requirements one, two (caseload and capacity utilization rate) but still has to work on numbers three and four (vaccination coverage),” she added.
Alert Level 2 has been extended until March 31 for Cebu province, together with Bohol, Negros Oriental, and the cities of Lapu-Lapu and Mandaue.
Based on the latest figures from the Visayas Vaccination Operations Center (VVOC), the COVID-19 vaccination coverage rate in Cebu City stood at approximately 58 percent as of March 14.
The figures included the number of senior citizens, and children aged 5 to 17 years old eligible to receive the free vaccines.
The cities of Lapu-Lapu and Mandaue also recorded immunization coverage rates of 78 percent and 89 percent, respectively.
In Cebu province, the same data from VVOC showed that around 1.4 million individuals have been fully vaccinated as of March 14.
This translates to an immunization coverage rate of approximately 44 percent since the province’s population of individuals qualified to receive free vaccines is more than 3.2 million, the biggest in Central Visayas. /rcg
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