Basilan seeks moratorium on sending back residents stranded in Manila

ZAMBOANGA CITY, Philippines — The Basilan provincial government has requested the Inter-Agency Task Force on the Management of Emerging Infectious Disease to suspend sending home provincial residents stranded in Manila.

The province has already tallied 69 COVID-19 cases as of Sunday night.

Basilan Gov. Hajiman Saliman-Hataman made the request, saying the province's quarantine facilities are already almost filled up by locally-stranded individuals, or LSIs, who have arrived recently.

"I have requested the (National) IATF if possible to halt for two weeks the transport of the LSIs even just those who are in Manila so we can declog our quarantine facility areas and we can recover. Because the machinery of our frontliners is in the brink of collapsing since most of them are also placed in quarantine,” Hataman said.

The Basilan governor said he already informed Presidential Peace Adviser Carlito Galvez, chief implementer of the government strategy agaist COVID-19, to find out how the national agency can reinforce their situation in the province.

Hataman said he will also meet with the provincial IATF to determine how to handle the situation with the exploding number of cases "because our quarantine facilities are almost full to its capacity."

Hataman said the two-week delay on sending the LSIs back to Basilan will give the province time to reduce the crowding in quarantine facilities.

"I see this is the means that can help us if we are given the space to minimize the arrival (of LSIs), we can declog the quarantine facilities and we can restore again the machinery of our frontliners because almost all of them were also quarantined," Hataman said in Filipino.