LEGAZPI CITY –– At least 43 residents in this city got infected with COVID-19 in a single day Thursday, its highest number of new cases recorded since March last year.
The newly recorded cases brought up to 316 the number of active COVID-19 cases in the capital city of Albay province as of Thursday, with one death.
The city’s COVID-19 tracker shows that it has recorded 913 cumulative cases since March last year, with 695 recoveries and 21 deaths.
Mayor Noel Rosal, who chairs the city’s Interagency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Disease (IATF), said they had dispatched additional frontline health workers to step up the contact tracing process.
Rosal said they were looking at public complacency, the entry of residents from the National Capital Region and its four neighboring provinces, the so-called NCR Plus bubble, and the new variants as the likely causes for the rise of infections here.
He noted that the public had not been following the minimum health protocols, like the wearing of face masks and observing physical distance in public places, and violating the prohibition on mass gatherings.
He said he would consult with the Bicol IATF on how to deal with rising infections in the region as this would also affect the city’s status as a “moderate risk area” that enabled the city to remain under modified general community quarantine, the most relaxed quarantine classification.
Bicol logged 233 new cases Tuesday, the highest since last week. This brought to 3,038 the number of active cases in the region composed of Camarines Sur, Camarines Norte, Albay, Sorsogon, Catanduanes, and Masbate provinces.
The Department of Health tracker showed 11,193 virus cases were recorded in the region since March last year, with 7,542 recoveries and 380 deaths.