Mayor Jerry P. Treñas wants to place the entire city of Iloilo under the lowest COVID-19 alert level.
In his letter dated March 8, Treñas appealed to de-escalate the city’s quarantine status from Alert Level 2 to Alert Level 1 to “allow the opening of more economic activities.”
“Business owners and workers alike are constantly requesting for the city government’s humanitarian consideration in allowing more activities to take place but seeing that we are bound to follow the classification assigned by the IATF-EID, we are left with no other choice but to echo their plea for due cogitation,” he said.
The mayor noted that the city’s COVID-19 infections went down from 1,113 in the recent two weeks to 276 as of March 7.
“With tight surveillance, stringent implementation of health protocols, massive RT-PCR (reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction) testing, swift isolation of close contacts with concomitant disinfection, COVID-19 infection in Iloilo City has dramatically decreased. This significant data must be given preferential attention and considerable weight to merit the de-escalation of our alert level status to Level 1,” Treñas said.
As of March 6, the city’s healthcare utilization rate (HCUR) was at 45.56 percent. “This is not even considering that we are poised to start operating another 67-bed capacity modular hospital.”
“Hospitals and healthcare units in Iloilo City, which is the regional capital of Western Visayas, are not only catering residents. Considering that most of the hospitals are referral hospitals, a significant portion of the admitted patients with severe medical cases, are those coming from nearby provinces and cities,” Treñas said.
The mayor’s letter was addressed to National Task Force (NTF) Against COVID-19 chief Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, NTF chief implementer Carlito Galvez Jr., Health Secretary Francisco Duque III and Interior and Local Government Secretary Eduardo Año through Undersecretary Epimaco Densing III, and the National Inter-Agency Task Force on the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases through their regional counterparts.IMT
Photo by Randy Javier Padrigo
