Hotels offer free rooms to frontliners

Several hotels in Manila have offered the free use of over 600 rooms to medical frontliners assigned to public hospitals in the city for the duration of the Luzon-wide enhanced community quarantine.

“[I have] directed the Manila Health Department and all city hospital directors to take note and submit [a] list of our doctors, nurses [and] health workers in the city government who live outside Manila,” Mayor Francisco “Isko Moreno” Domagoso said in a Facebook live video on Wednesday night.

He made the announcement after he issued Executive Order No. 17 which ordered “all the motels and hotels in the city to accommodate the health workers of the six city hospitals of Manila, including those of national government hospitals….”

Hotel Sogo said it would provide 421 rooms, while Eurotel and Town and Country Hotel, respectively, pledged 50 and 60 rooms. Bayview Park Hotel said it would offer 15 rooms while UN Residences said it would provide 90 rooms, plus food, for healthcare workers. Dormitels.ph also pledged over 300 beds.

Domagoso said on Thursday afternoon that over 40 rooms would be allotted to employees of the Philippine General Hospital (PGH) after its staff asked him for assistance.

To make it easier for them to get to work, the medical workers will be ferried by 189 e-tricycles that will be deployed to public hospitals. The drivers will receive compensation, said Manila Public Information Office chief Julius Leonen.

Approval uncertain

Whether the deployment of e-trikes will be approved by the government, however, remains to be seen. Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles, spokesperson of the Interagency Task Force on Emerging Diseases, earlier stood firm on the ban on public transport, including tricycles, saying the three-wheelers were too small to practice social distancing.

The six hospitals being operated by the city government were Ospital ng Maynila, Sta. Ana Hospital, Ospital ng Tondo, Gat Andres Bonifacio Memorial Medical Center, Ospital ng Sampaloc and Justice Abad Santos Medical Center.

The city is also home to major government hospitals like PGH, Jose Reyes Memorial Medical Center, and San Lazaro Hospital—where several patients diagnosed with the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) are confined.

As of Thursday morning, nine Manila residents have tested positive for the virus while 24 others have been tagged as persons under investigation.

Mobility problems

The Luzon-wide lockdown and a ban on public transport have created problems for many people, including health workers, who still need to get to work.

Andro Cornejo, a nurse at PGH, said that some of his coworkers were finding it difficult to get to the hospital because of the lack of public utility vehicles. Others were barred from entering Manila by policemen manning checkpoints even though they identified themselves as medical personnel.