Sunday Masses suspended again in Baguio

BAGUIO CITY — Sunday Masses and other religious services have again been suspended as Baguio deals with a spike in coronavirus disease infections.

NO ENTRY. Various neighborhoods in Baguio City have been locked down to allow contract tracers to locate people who have interacted with 47 coronavirus patients last weekend. The villages also began disinfecting their communities. VINCENT CABREZA

Religious activities will be prohibited on August 2 and 9, now that “the rest of the city… (is) limiting movement and participating in disinfection activities on Sundays,” said Mayor Benjamin Magalong in a July 28 advisory.

Stressing that services gather people of different ages to enclosed spaces, Magalong urged local churches to offer Mass remotely while joining the summer capital in employing “stricter sanitation and crowd management protocols.”

As of Tuesday, the city recorded a hundred coronavirus disease (COVID-19) infections since March, with 47 patients currently receiving treatment.

The sharp increase was the result of “active surveillance,” when the city health services office began testing 10 percent of various Baguio sectors to draw out the real scope of local contamination, said Dr. Cecilia Brillantes, deputy city health officer, during a Tuesday (July 28) briefing.

The city’s epidemiology teams are currently studying the behavior of the disease, noting that a high number of patients were asymptomatic or have not displayed flu-like symptoms.

The medical community plans to study if Baguio’s high altitude was a factor in the number of asymptomatic patients, said Dr. Donabelle Tubera-Panes, the city epidemiologist.

She said they also intend to review data to determine if the ban on the sale and public consumption of liquor helped keep COVID-19 transmissions at bay. Panes said mauling and stabbing cases dipped during the liquor ban during the lockdown but rose slightly after the ban was lifted as quarantine restrictions eased in June and July.

The city government should consider including home consumption in the ban because of transmission cases that occurred during indoor drinking parties, Brillantes said.

The increase in Baguio infections has prompted neighboring Benguet towns to launch their own border controls.

Kapangan town locked down a village on Tuesday night because several of its residents have had contact with one of Baguio’s patients, according to an advisory from its mayor Manny Fermin.