BACOLOD City – Six business process outsourcing (BPO) firms here were issued with notices of violation for failing to register their employees to the city government’s contact tracing system.
The Emergency Operations Center (EOC) served the notices yesterday, said its deputy for medical data and analysis, Dr. Chris Sorongon.
These BPOs, he said, did not scan quick response codes despite being registered in the Bacolod Contact Tracing (BaC-Trac) system.
The BaC-Trac system is a web-based and mobile-based app developed for expeditious contact tracing of confirmed coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) positive patients in the city and, consequently, allows the EOC Task Force to locate people suspected of having contact with the positive cases.
“All BPO companies were able to register in the BaC-Trac. However, they are not using the system for their employees,” the EOC official lamented.
Sorongon did not name the five other BPOs but confirmed that Transcom was in the list.
The call center in Barangay Tangub logged 14 new COVID-19 cases on Monday.
Transcom’s “patient zero” was a resident of Barangay Bata who, for reasons still unclear, was allegedly allowed to report to work despite exhibiting mild symptoms prior to diagnosis.
Of the initial 41 cases, 33 were residents of the city while eight were from outside. All close contacts at home of this group of COVID-positives tested negative.
There are 206 more samples from the surveillance testing awaiting results.
At the site last night were policemen deployed to ensure no one entered nor exited the building while a health inquiry was ongoing./PN
