DAVAO CITY—Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio has requested the national government to scale up its quarantine restriction of the city to the stricter modified enhanced community quarantine (MECQ) from Saturday until the end of the month.
The city mayor filed this week her request to the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) as the City Health Office expressed belief that a Covid variant is likely causing a spike in infection as early as May.
Mayor Duterte presented the surging Covid-19 cases to support her request to place the city under MECQ in her letter addressed to Undersecretary Epimaco V. Densing III of the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) and chairman of the IATF Screening and Validation Committee.
“As of May 31, 2021, we have a total of 1,665 active cases currently admitted at the Southern Philippines Medical Center [SPMC] and our Temporary Treatment and Monitoring Facilities and Isolation Facilities,” she said.
Duterte-Carpio said there were nearly 1,000 cases reported from May 23 to 29 alone.
Dr. Ashley Lopez, acting City Health officer, said the city has 338 accumulated cases from the last four days of May, with 156 cases on May 28 alone. “This is the highest spike since October last year. It’s a spike, not a gradual increase,” he added.
He said the city enjoyed a lowdown in cases in March and April “when we have only 200 active cases.” By May, the cases immediately jumped to a daily average of 100 cases. “I believed there’s a variant causing this but this can not be confirmed yet because there was no result yet from the Philippine Genome Center.”
So far, the last known variant cases were recorded in February and March yet but the three UK variant and two South African variant cases among returning migrant workers were already quarantined in Manila for 14 to 28 days before they were allowed to go home to this city.
The mayor said she was concerned that the beds at the SPMC are already at a “critical utilization rate,” while the Intensive Care Units at SPMC and two private hospitals were already full.
While awaiting approval from the IATF, the city government has posted announcements of its request to prepare the 1.7 million residents for an eventual stricter quarantine protocols requiring residents to carry always their food-and-medicine pass, the equivalent of quarantine passes in other localities.
The mayor said her request to elevate the quarantine status to MECQ should allow “a circuit breaker in the surge of patients inside hospitals.”
Davao, along with Iligan City, has been placed in the category of more relaxed general community quarantine, but other cities in Mindanao, such as Butuan, Cagayan de Oro and Zamboanga, were placed under MECQ.
As it prepared the city for an MECQ status, the city government also called on those affected by MECQ “zero operational capacity [that they] can coordinate with the Trabaho Dabawenyo employment assistance at the City Mayor’s Office Special Project Office at Magsaysay Park.”
“Dabawenyos are encouraged to review the regulations for MECQ by reading the IATF Omnibus Guidelines dated May 20, 2021, particularly Page 9, Section 3 and the Department of Trade and Industry Memorandum Circular No. 21-19 dated May 14, 2021,” the city said.
Among the salient points of the guidelines include limiting the movement of all persons to accessing goods and establishments and for work in such establishments, and requiring to stay at home any person below 18 years old, above 65 years old, persons with comorbidities and pregnant women “except for obtaining essential goods and services.”