Cebu City opens 10 more barangay isolation centers as cases mount

CEBU, Philippines —  Ten more barangay isolation centers (BICs) have been opened in Cebu City, adding 762 new beds to the existing facilities in order to accommodate more COVID-19 patients as the new cases continue to pile up.

The opening of the 10 BICs is part of the Emergency Operations Center’s (EOC) measures to shore up its personnel and resources for its extraction efforts.

Harold Alcontin, Cebu City Disaster Risk Reduction Management Office (CCDRRMO) operations head and in-charge of extraction team, said that personnel and ambulances from their office helped in fast-tracking the efforts of the EOC extraction team.

Alcontin, speaking in an online forum hosted by the Office of the Presidential Assistant for the Visayas Facebook page, explained that extraction teams are tasked with pulling out COVID patients from their homes and transferring them to isolation centers.

But the challenge, he said, is that majority of the individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19 refuse to cooperate with the authorities, especially during extraction procedures.

Retired Maj. Gen. Mel Feliciano, the chief implementer of the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Disease (IATF-MEID) in the Visayas, has given the EOC until this weekend to extract all the backlogs.

Alcontin said extracting these confirmed positive individuals would help lessen the possibility of transmission within the households, as well as the need for other members to undergo swab tests and the houses to be locked down.

Cebu City Councilor and EOC chief implementer Joel Garganera said only two of the 80 barangays have no reported transmission from the very start. These two are the barangays of Paril and Tabunan.

Garganera also said that 67 barangays have reported transmission for the last 14 days.

Data from the Department of Health-7 showed that as of yesterday, Feb. 13, Cebu City has 14,604 total reported cases with 10,974 recoveries and 713 deaths. On the same day, it logged 235 new cases, bringing the total active cases to 2,917. — JMD (FREEMAN)