BACOLOD City-This city has vaccinated 88 percent of the target population for coronavirus disease-2019(COVOD-19) vaccines, according to Mayor Evelio Leonardia’s statement released on Jan. 27.
The mayor said the city vaccinated over 523,000 residents out of 590,000. “The Department of Health (DOH) figures, Bacolod, with its 590,000 of vaccinable population, has already reached the 127 percent mark,” he added.
Leonardia explained that means we only have to reach 67,000 people to achieve a 100 percent fully-vaccinated population.”
According to the World Health Organization and DOH standards, consider that a local government unit( LGU) has reached herd immunity once 70 percent of its target population has already been fully inoculated.
Meanwhile, for about two years, Leonardia was hands-on in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic and never traveled outside of Bacolod despite his being president of the 146-member League of Cities of the Philippines and as a member of the Legislative-Executive Development Advisory Council (LEDAC) representing the LGUs.
He said that like many local governments, this city had its share of the roller-coaster ride with the pandemic with the city currently on its fourth wave of the surge.
“We have very rough times,” he recalled, citing that sometime in September and October last year, the city had 119 cases daily on the average.
The rate went down to 20 in November and only six in December 2021.
In fact, at the start of January 2022 on the first week of the New Year, Bacolod had zero cases, he recalled.
Then all of a sudden, in a few days, we started to hit double figures and up to three digits. On Jan.26, we had 235 in a single day (new cases), Leonardia said./PN
