Cebu City awaiting final word on its ECQ

This is now my last column for the month and by Monday, June 1, Cebu City will be off from Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ), that’s if Cebu City Mayor Edgardo Labella of the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) thinks that we have already licked COVID-19. We can only announce that as of today the number of deaths in the Philippines has not reached 900, while in the United States they have already passed the 100,000 fatality record.

While Cebu City or the IATF focuses on restoring the health of our people, however for as long as no cure for COVID-19 is forthcoming, we must now find solutions to our predicament. I’ve always said that we ought to look at what they did in Taiwan who succeeded in solving the problem without going into a serious lockdown. Same is true with Japan. So why can’t we follow these two countries so we can now focus on restarting our failed economy?

At this point in time many fellow Cebuanos using social media are waiting for the final word either from the IATF or Cebu City Mayor Edgardo Labella on whether we should wait for another extension, which would honestly no longer achieve anything good for Cebu City. In the meantime, the second Bayanihan Cebu Field Center, an isolation and treatment facility at the International Eucharistic Congress Convention Center (IC3) in Cebu City, has officially opened the other day.

The ICE center is aimed at beefing up Cebu’s capacity to handle COVID-19 patients with mild to moderate symptoms. Call it timely as Cebu City is poised to reopen businesses in a bid to recover its economy. Actually, Cebu City has three Bayanihan Centers, the other two are located at the old Sacred Heart School along Mango Ave. while the other is the P100 million facility that the City of Cebu constructed at the North Reclamation Center. The two Bayanihan Cebu Field Centers have enclosed, fully air-conditioned shelter bays that have negative air pressure facilities equipped with medical grade high efficiency particle arresting (HEPA).

At the North Reclamation Area the 150- to 200-bed facility has negative pressure rooms and filters. It can serve to isolate and treat confirmed cases with moderate symptoms. The Department of Health (DOH) said that it could also be used as a step-down facility from Level 2 or 3 health facilities for those severe cases that have recovered but are still not laboratory negative. Dr. Jaime Bernadas, Department of Health in Central Visayas (DOH-7) regional director, said the health sector has already increased its capacity to test for COVID-19 with the establishment of three molecular laboratories in Cebu.

With these three COVID-19 centers ready to serve the people of Cebu City, we expect our frontliners to use them effectively so that Cebu City can focus on restarting our economy while our medical services continue to combat the virus. Already our economy is in tatters and even if we restart our economy on June 1, it won’t be an easy task as so many small companies have decided to shut down their businesses. The arrival of many overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) who are out of work in their host countries adds to the weight of bringing back our economy. Unfortunately we are now in the new order of things!

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This week, Cebu saw a big breaking news which we got from The Freeman. Renato Llenes, the primary suspect in the killing of 16-year-old Christine Lee Silawan, was found dead in his cell at the male dormitory of the Lapu-Lapu City Jail last Sunday. Remember him? He made nationwide headlines when he killed Christine Silawan and removed her face after killing her.

It was around 6 a.m. Sunday when Supt. Casumpang of the Lapu-Lapu City jail was informed by a nurse that the suspect, Renato Llenes, was rushed to the clinic after he was found lifeless in the restroom inside his cell in what appeared to be a suicide. Supt. Calumpang also said they had to move Llenes away from other inmates since he reportedly received death threats from Silawan’s uncle who is also detained at the same jail facility.

Meanwhile Police Regional Office (PRO)-7 Director Albert Ignatius Ferro himself ordered an in-depth investigation into the incident because as Supt. Calumpang said they are now investigating the possibility of foul play because the condition in which Llenes was found did not seem to reflect the condition of other inmates who also committed suicide by hanging, like a protruding tongue and clothes soiled with vomit. Indeed we need to know whether there was foul play here.

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