Follow curfew to stop virus, San Juan urges residents

MANILA, Philippines — The city government of San Juan is appealing to residents to strictly comply with the two-week unified curfew in Metro Manila as cases in the city continue to increase.

Mayor Francis Zamora said San Juan had 232 active cases as of Monday, down from 252 the previous day.

However, he noted that the city has seen an 18-percent increase since March 1. On Wednesday last week, the city recorded 196 active cases.

“What I’m seeing is an upward trend and this is something we’ll have to monitor on a daily basis. The infection rate itself has increased in the whole of Metro Manila, based on figures from the Department of Health and the OCTA Research Group,” he said in an interview aired over ABS-CBN TeleRadyo.

The government is pointing to complacency among Filipinos as the cause of the increasing caseload, which led to the reimposition of curfews in Metro Manila and several other areas to prevent unnecessary movement.

Several local government units have also implemented obligations on establishments and workplace administrators to keep their areas safe as they have identified patients who were infected at work and later infected their whole household.

Proposals, however, to increase the number of public utility vehicles have yet to be approved, even as local government units have determined that other cases that infected a whole household got the virus inside crammed PUVs or while waiting in crowded terminals.