ILOILO City – Mayor Jerry Treñas requested the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-MEID) to reassess this city’s enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) classification.
Treñas appealed the factors upon which the IATF decisions are anchored for community quarantine declarations.
This city is still under ECQ until Aug. 15 based on the latest IATF declaration.
Treñas said the health care utilization reflects not only coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients who are residents of Iloilo City but mostly from the provinces of Iloilo and Aklan.
Treñas thus requested the IATF-MEID and the Department of Health (DOH) to assist neighboring provinces to open more intensive care unit (ICU) beds.
“This shall benefit not only exhausted health care workers but the whole Region 6,” Treñas said.
Treñas also pointed out that the number of cases in Iloilo city from Aug. 1 to Aug. 5, 2021 was significantly lower than those of Iloilo province and Aklan, citing DOH data.
Also, the mayor said the financial aid and assistance for basic commodities are insufficient.
“The adverse impacts of the prolonged hard lockdown since May 2021 cannot be solely ameliorated by the release of cash aids from the DSWD (Department of Social Welfare and Development),” said Treñas.
The city mayor noted, too, the readiness of the city’s COVID Emergency Response and Contingencies as well as the augmentation of medical personnel for hospital catering moderate to severe COVID-19 patients.
A month ago when the city was under the modified ECQ and with the significant number of patients on the hospital waiting list, the medical frontliners got exhausted, he pointed out.
The city asked the services of uniformed personnel who were medical personnel and hired several nurses.
“Thus, we are pleading with you to send us healthcare workers to buffer the strain currently experienced by our own frontliners,” said Treñas.
Lastly, the city mayor emphasized the provision of COVID-19 medicines and other essentials.
“We take this opportune time to ask for your munificence in providing us with mechanical ventilators, high flow O2 cannulas and Bilevel Positive Airway pressure (BiPAP) ventilators, among others,” said Treñas.
“(I) hope that genuine attention be devoted to the city’s predicament such that out community quarantine classification be assessed accordingly to specific concerns,” Treñas appealed.
He added: “The city government has significantly upgraded its health systems capacity, intensified testing and isolation but over the course of all this, the ECQ status imposed barely averted the surge in cases as the facts remains that it is battling with new COVID variants.”/PN
