In late February to early March, there was still some debate as to the correct protocol of wearing a mask. During that time, the World Health Organization (WHO) advised that wearing a face mask was reserved among frontliners, symptomatic individuals, and high-risk persons only. Even then, however, the mayor of Butuan City issued an order making the same mandatory for all persons in the locality – frontliner or not. This undoubtedly helped curb the spread of the disease early on.
While everyone else was busy purchasing basic necessities, such as rice and canned goods among others for their people, the mayor of Butuan was busy juggling food sustainability with the groundwork for a robust healthcare system in Butuan in response to COVID-19.
And finally, while everyone else was busy debating about the need for, and the importance of, rapid antibody testing, the mayor of Butuan wasted no time to acquire 50,000 rapid antibody test kits during the onset of the pandemic in the locality.
Foresight, deduction, premonition, or perhaps a mixture of all three – whatever guided Mayor Ronnie Vicente Lagnada to make those early decisions has definitely been a blessing to the regional center of Caraga known as Butuan City.
An engineer by training and profession, he and his team took a systematic, methodical, and science-backed approach to combat COVID-19, with some of their decisions met with skepticism and disapproval at first. With the benefit of hindsight, however, these early decisions have continued to yield positive results not only for the people of Butuan, but also the rest of the region.
“You can’t fight a virus if you don’t know where it is,” said the World Health Organization, and this became the rationale for Butuan’s early targeted testing. As a result, the city is now the regional leader insofar as the government’s T3 (Test, Trace, Treat) program is concerned; which was acknowledged by the Chief Implementer of the National Task Force for COVID-19 when he came to visit.
“The fact that we have test kits means that we are able to test as many people as possible, especially those who have shown symptoms, those who just arrived from places with local transmission, and those who are at high risk – our frontliners in the health sector,” Lagnada explained. “Targeted testing provides the necessary data to facilitate efficient contact tracing, and ultimately, treatment,” he added.
Of course, the unassuming mayor was quick to add that Butuanons do not live in isolation. Accordingly, the city recognizes the interconnectedness and the interdependence among the provinces, cities, and municipalities throughout the region. “As a regional leader, Butuan City has a huge role in Caraga’s journey toward becoming a COVID-free region, and we consider it an honor and a privilege to help other areas in whatever way we can. As Butuanons, we must identify not only with our fellow Butuanons, but also with our fellow Caraganons. We are, after all, one Caraga,” Lagnada emphasized.
To date, Butuan City has received a number of requests for test kits from other LGUs. These are the provinces of Dinagat Islands, Surigao del Sur, Misamis Oriental, Agusan del Norte, and Agusan del Sur. All of them intend to acquire test kits from Butuan, and conduct targeted testing in their respective localities.
The establishment of Butuan’s local Real-Time Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) laboratory is also around the corner, and their local government unit is currently in close coordination with their regional counterparts to assist them in establishing their own PCR laboratories.
“It is heartening for me to see that the entire Caraga region is working as one unified community – cooperatively and selflessly – to respond effectively to this pandemic,” Lagnada shared. “I think a timely analogy would be like wearing a mask: you do it to protect not only yourself, but the others around you. In the same way, the health and safety of our neighbors translates into our own health and safety as well,” the mayor concluded.
From my stand, it seems that Butuan City will be remembered for far more than being a regional trailblazer in targeted testing during this pandemic. I believe the city will be better remembered for its “Kuya of Caraga”, who stepped up in the face of adversity and challenges. Indeed, as most kuyas know, the best decisions are oftentimes unpopular, but result in the best outcomes.
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Staying under quarantine for months has glued us to the boob tube for much of our waking moments, so we know how CNN’s live breaking news broadcasters rate the fitness of the American president for his job (not fit, so the broadcasters say), and the leading figures in the protest movement against police brutality. The channel’s unrelenting dramatic coverage of the protest movement in US cities brought back to me images of black heroes and heroines taught us in school, such as Booker T. Washington and Rosa Parks – who sparked the movement for fair and equal justice. But first, I’d like to share with my readers the origin of the term “Juneteenth,” actually a historical event which today’s black and white demonstrators, brandishing placards saying “Black Lives Matter,” hold high to equalize rights, in the truest sense of the word, between black and white persons.
The term is derived from the day, June 19, 1865, when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger and 2,000 Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, and declared all slaves free by reading the Emancipation Proclamation which was actually signed by President Abraham Lincoln three years earlier, on Sept. 22, 1862, nearing the end of the American Civil War that pitted the government’s Union forces against the Confederates, who wanted the non-abolition of slavery. The proclamation declared freedom for 20,000 slaves in the United States. Today, black persons decry their being discriminated against, yes, shot from behind by the police, something they claimed police do not do to white suspects.
Rosa Parks, a seamstress by occupation, helped initiate the civil rights movement in the US when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus on Dec. 1, 1955. At the time white people occupied the front seats of the bus, and the blacks, the rear section. In compliance with the state’s Jim Crow segregation laws (still applied despite the Emancipation Proclamation of Sept. 22, 1862), she was arrested. On the day of her conviction, the leaders of the local black community, led by a young Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott which lasted more than a year, and ended only when the US Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional. Rosa became known as “the mother of the civil rights movement.” In 1999, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor the US bestows on a civilian. When she died at the age of 92 on Oct. 24, 2005, she became the first woman in the nation’s history to lie in state at the US Capitol.
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Email: dominitorrevillas@gmail.com