'The local government should be felt. ’Pag nag-lockdown ka, ’tapos pinabayaan mo ang mga tao, ’wag ka na,' says Legazpi City Mayor Noel Rosal. Read this in-depth piece by JCGotinga on how Legazpi City dealt with the coronavirus pandemic:
MANILA, Philippines – The roughly 200,000 people of Legazpi City, Albay, understand danger. All their lives, they’ve been under threat from Mayon, the country’s most active volcano.
He was especially worried for people in the slums, who might not have other sources of information on the pandemic, and yet were particularly vulnerable to contagion because they live in close quarters.Rosal told Rappler. Along with the rest of Luzon, Legazpi City was placed on lockdown or enhanced community quarantine on March 17. There was no recorded case of the coronavirus in Legazpi or in the rest of the Bicol region then.
Contact tracers located people who had been at the airport and taken the same flights as Bautista, and even the employees of the party's caterer from Naga City. The contacts were “seriously advised” to go into self-quarantine. Earlier on March 31, Mayor Rosal announced that the city’s 8,000-seater stadium, the Ibalong Centrum for Recreation , had been converted into an isolation area for suspect and probable coronavirus cases.The city began isolating contacts of virus patients at the ICR stadium on April 2, around the time the national government announcedIsolating potential carriers of the virus as quickly as possible was crucial if the city was to be spared from a massive outbreak, Rosal said.
When people are traced to have been exposed to confirmed COVID-19 cases, they get a written notification from the City Health Officer, delivered by the barangay captain. They are given a maximum of 6 hours to coordinate their transfer to the ICR. The machines were delivered to the city by the end of April. Now, Legazpi can test up to 600 people for the coronavirus every day, but, so far, it has only needed to do an average of 200 to 300 tests daily.
That’s the secret, Rosal said: provide for the people you’ve put on lockdown, and they will gladly abide by it. Although Ambo was pretty strong, it caused minimal damage to Legazpi and left no fatalities. The local government had to ration out more food because people stayed indoors, but the city was virtually unscathed.Ever hardy, Legazpi residents nimbly adjusted to the rules and protocols for the pandemic, Mayor Rosal said.
Each cluster had half a day, every other day, to buy food and necessities, and to run errands. During ECQ, only one household member was issued a quarantine pass and allowed outdoors. “Ako, akuin ko, medyo nagkaproblema, pero mga kababayan namin ’yan. So gumawa kami ng sistema. Dahil wala kami masyadong cases, sila pinagtuunan namin,”On May 29, Rosal released guidelines on how the city would handle the returnees.
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