BY MATÉ ESPINA
THE CALL for unity will remain a dream in this time of pandemic as officials in Bacolod and Negros Occidental couldn’t bring themselves to work as one.
Bacolod City is on MECQ (modified enhanced community quarantine) until Sept. 30 and continues to dish out triple digit numbers on a daily basis. In just two days, another 342 new cases were added to the list, bringing the total cases to 2,774 with 35 deaths. Negros Occidental meanwhile shows high double digits of 88 and 87 cases for Wednesday and Thursday respectively and now has 1,411 cases.
Bacolod tops the number of cases in Western Visayas but Negros Occidental was dislodged from second place by Iloilo City which has 1,673 cases as of this writing but still lower by more than a thousand cases than Bacolod.
If that is not enough woes for Bacolod, City Administrator Em Ang reported that based on their data, hospital facilities are saturated by 98 percent already. Add to that the closure of several sections in government hospitals because of infection.
The Corazon Locsin Montelibano Memorial Regional Hospital, the only government hospital in the city, recently declared they’ve reached their maximum bed capacity for COVID cases including their newly-opened COVID critical care unit. The hospital’s Obstetric and Gynecology unit and their Neonatal ICU were also closed and they will not accept any other cases except emergency ones.
The Teresita Jalandoni Provincial Hospital in neighboring Silay also shut down their operating and delivery rooms, and their internal medicine and pediatric wards after eight hospital staff were compromised when seven patients from these departments tested positive.
In Bacolod, the hunt continues to locate five missing positives that participated in last month’s mass testing but wrote down fictitious names and contact numbers.
Bacolod Vice Mayor El Cid Familiaran said that mandatory quarantine days for these missing positives may have elapsed, “but what if they infected others.” Contact tracing after the mass testing is vital to subsequently test and isolate the close contacts of the positives but when they go missing, you will never know the extent of the contamination.
There is another hunt ongoing as well, this time for Bacolod APORs who flew in last Wednesday but refused to follow health protocols imposed by the provincial government at the Bacolod-Silay airport which is under the jurisdiction of the province.
The province ordered their arrest but four of the seven were located Thursday and were swabbed and placed in quarantine facilities. These APORs said they belong to the DC Aquino Land Surveying Services and PAX Cable, Inc.
These seven APORs refused to be swabbed upon their arrival and instead, showed a letter from a Bacolod councilor, saying they are exempt from such protocols. It would have been nice to know who that councilor is but Provincial Administrator Ray Diaz refused to divulge the name of the official.
The city and the province have been at odds many times with their policies in dealing with this crisis. Both LGUs have been bashed in social media for issuing policies that oftentimes counter each other and with Bacolod as the capital city, this has led to a lot of confusion.
Despite the crisis, politics is rearing its ugly head particularly in Bacolod. In the latest session of the city council, Archie Baribar sponsored a resolution asking the city government to submit a “status report” on the P119 M Bayanihan grant. This was co-authored by eight of the mayor’s close allies.
What was hilarious about this was the same proposal was sought by opposition Councilor Jun Gamboa a week ago but was thumbs down by the council. This led to so much bashing of both the mayor and the council in social media.
However, according to Baribar, Gamboa’s proposal was not in their agenda and was made while the SP was about to adjourn their virtual meeting. Since the same can be refiled and “to dispel malicious interpretations and insinuations and to emphasize that all are one for transparency and accountability,” Baribar re-introduced the proposal.
Gamboa has been accused of politicking by the mayor’s followers especially when he revealed the excessive estimate amounts for the procurement of medical goods under the P113M budget proposed by the city.
Among the questionable items were millions worth of Vitamin C with zinc which was estimated at P2,250 per box when a similar item can be bought at less than P400; alcohol priced at P1,500 per gallon when the same can be purchased for P500 in retail market and face shields at P100 each when prices range from a low of P25-50.
City Health Officer, Dr. Carmela Gensoli justified their purchase request estimates as standard for them to set higher prices to avoid falling short of the budget. But when estimates are over 400 percent higher than actual, then that raises questions. The fact too that it is impossible for the health department not to know of the price range of vitamins which are commonly purchased raised more brows.
Gamboa may be accused of politicking but during these times, this lone opposition is coming out as a hero./PN
