Cebu City has tested 10% of its population for COVID-19

CEBU, Philippines —  Cebu City has already tested over a hundred thousand individuals or about 10 percent of its total population, a milestone in COVID-19 testing, according to Emergency Operations Center deputy chief implementer and City Councilor Joel Garganera.

“We have tested 100,000 that represents 10.++%  of the total one million (or so) population of Cebu City. That’s a milestone in Covid testing,” said Garganera.

Earlier, Department of Health-7’s chief pathologist and COVID-19 spokesperson Dr. Mary Jean Loreche suggested that Cebu City should have an aggressive testing again following the sudden spike of cases.

With the high outside transmission, Loreche said testing has to be done by sector for surveillance.

Right now, outside transmission is at 86.89 %, majority of the source of which is takes place at the workplace.

Garganera said testing of the different sectors is already being coordinated with the Go Negosyo and DOH.

DOH case bulletin has logged a total of 10,584 confirmed cases in Cebu City 9,530 of which have recovered but 682 unfortunately died.

As of November 23, Cebu City recorded two new cases, a respite after posting double digits in the past six days.

Garganera said the two new cases were out of the 277 samples taken over the weekend.

Even with this, Garganera noted that the daily average for this month has doubled compared to the last month and from having no frontliner/medical staff worker infected with COVID-10 from October 20 to November 10, there are already 20 cases involving such group who got the virus.

“Complacency is still our number one enemy. We all need to be mindful of our health protocols but for hospital frontliners, they should be doubly mindful,” he said.

Expenses

Meanwhile, City Councilor Nestor Archival told The FREEMAN that the council is not yet done scrutinizing the COVID-19 expenses of the city after documents needed remain unavailable, including the purchase orders.

Not even the presence of personnel from the Philippines Government Procurement System or PhilGEPS was able to help the council on what it needed, Archival said.

Councilors earlier called on the executive department to fast-track its liquidation reports on the COVID fund which totaled more than P1 billion. This is to guide them in determining the allocations for COVID-19 expenses for the next fiscal period. — JMD  (FREEMAN)