More COVID-19 burial sites eyed in Cebu City

CEBU, Philippines — In a bid to address the backlog in crematories in Cebu City due to coronavirus-related deaths, Department of Environment and Natural Resources Secretary and Cebu overseer Roy Cimatu is leading the search for areas that can be immediately converted into burial sites.

Together with local environment officials, Cimatu inspected possible sites in Barangay Sapangdaku on Monday.

“We have to immediately identify burial sites that are outside protected areas, and will pose no harm to the immediate community,” Cimatu said in a statement released by the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF)Visayas.

IATF deputy chief implementer in Cebu Mel Feliciano, who is assisting Cimatu, welcomed the initiative after the city’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC) adopted a more proactive response to the pandemic.

“Forward planning and swift implementation will give Cebu City the edge it needs to defeat COVID-19. There is an urgent public health risk posed by the lack of crematories, so we have to do what we can and do it quickly,” Feliciano said.

It can be recalled that the Cebu City government also announced its plan to develop a new burial site in the mountain barangay of Guba.

The city owned the 30-hectare property in the said barangay but it will only use about three to five hectares for the “Botanical Memorial Garden” which is just beside a Muslim cemetery.  KQD (FREEMAN)