BY CHRYSEE G. SAMILLANO
The Bacolod City government has appealed to Interior and Local Government Secretary Eduardo Año to renew the contract of 115 contract tracers for the city which expired on December 31, 2021, Dr. Cris Sorongon, Emergency Operations Center-Task Force deputy for medical and data analysis, said.
Sorongon said that for the meantime, the police and the Barangay Health Emergency Response Teams (BHERTs) have been trained as contact tracers to contain the possible spread of Covid-19 or the Omicron variant. So far, their contact tracing is still on top of the situation.
Bacolod is technically under Alert Level 2. But while the hospital capacity utilization rate is still low, they saw that Covid-19 cases have accelerated in the past two weeks to double digits after almost a month of recording single digits. Last week was the highest with a total of 36 new cases, he said.
In a recent meeting held by the EOC-TF with Mayor Evelio Leonardia, they have decided to focus more on the preventive aspect. Today, they will meet with the barangay captains and the BHERTs to intensify preventive measures to contain or prevent the spread of the virus, Sorongon said.
They are taking precaution against the possible entry of persons who are positive for the Omicron variant, he said.
“We should not be confident that Omicron is a mild variant of Covid-19. It is contagious and can spread fast. If it spreads fast our hospitals and healthcare system might be overwhelmed which we don’t want to happen,” he added.*
