Labella asks task force to review basis for Cebu City’s ECQ status

CEBU CITY, Cebu, Philippines — Mayor Edgardo Labella is asking the country’s coronavirus task force to reconcile conflicting data on virus cases in Cebu City while reviewing its “ground-level” response to the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

Labella on Sunday said the discordant figures might expain why the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) and President Duterte decided to put the city back to enhanced community quarantine (ECQ), the only area in the country that is under the strictest form of lockdown, on June 16.

“I think the data they (IATF) have and we (city government) have are not quite the same. I hope they will make the proper reconciliation of their data and our data on the ground,” the mayor said.

The IATF was tasked to evaluate for a week the city’s COVID-19 situation starting on Monday. The result of the evaluation would enable the IATF to decide if there is a need to install a National Task Force Emergency Operation Center in the city and designate a Visayas deputy implementer.

As of 3 p.m. Sunday, Cebu City has 4,239 virus cases but only 2,074 were active. It also recorded 2,092 recoveries and 73 deaths.

Labella said the mortality rate in the city was just at 1 percent while its 60 percent recovery rate exceeded the national figures of 20 percent.

The increasing number of COVID-19 cases here, he added, was due to the continued mass testing.

“Cebu City has low mortality and high recovery rates. That is because we were able to test, trace, isolate and treat. If only these things were considered [by the task force], we should have been under GCQ (general community quarantine),” he said. INQ