FILE PHOTO: Marikina City Mayor Marcelino Teodoro. Photo from Marikina PIO Facebook
MANILA, Philippines — The local government of Marikina City is doing everything it can to prevent the more contagious COVID-19 Delta variant from entering the city, Mayor Marcelino Teodoro said Thursday.
According to Teodoro, the city would impose stricter protocols to ensure that the Delta variant — said to be 60 percent more transmissible than the already contagious Alpha variant — would not spread in the locality.
The two variants are just among a number of variants that came out from mutations of the original SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes the serious respiratory illness COVID-19.
To date, the city has not yet recorded a single COVID-19 patient carrying the Delta variant.
“With the new quarantine classifications announced by the IATF, the Marikina city government has geared up for the possible increase of COVID-19 cases, and prevent the entry of the highly contagious Delta variant in the city,” Teodoro said.
“With the threat of the new variant, Marikina will exhaust all possible measures and available resources, as well as to employ stricter protocols to prevent the entry and spread of the variant and stem the increase in cases,” he added.
He vowed to enforce expanded testing and contact tracing while implementing strict isolation and quarantine system to cut off any possible infections. But aside from these, residents of the city regardless of their vaccination status must still observe public health standards like frequent hand washing, wearing of face masks, and physical distancing.
The local chief executive also asked the national government for more supplies of anti-COVID-19 vaccines — at least four million doses — so that the city would be able to inoculate its residents as well as workers who frequent the city.
“The Marikina LGU is continuously reminding residents to always practice minimum public health standards even for fully-vaccinated individuals,” Teodoro said. “As such, the city government will aggressively intensify its inoculation drive to immunize Marikina residents against the dreaded variant of COVID-19.”
“We need to ramp up the vaccination in Marikina due to the threat of the Delta variant. We implore the national government to deploy at least 4 million additional vaccine doses to Marikina City to boost our inoculation program and vaccinate as many people as possible,” he added.
On Thursday, the Department of Health (DOH) said the Philippines now has a total of 216 COVID-19 Delta variant cases, citing the latest results of genome sequencing.
READ: Delta variant cases almost doubled overnight to 216, with 97 new cases — DOH
The Delta variant, first discovered in India, has been characterized by increased transmissibility which led to record-breaking surges in the South Asian country during the second quarter of 2021, as well as soaring cases in Indonesia that prompted health experts across the globe to monitor the situation in the Philippines’ neighboring state.
READ: Indonesia bracing for worsening COVID-19 outbreak
READ: Delta variant puts brakes on return to post-COVID normality
While Marikina has yet to register any Delta variant case, Teodoro said they are open to the possibility of doing granular lockdowns, or area and community-based quarantine restrictions “as part of our proactive measures against the dreaded disease.”
“We need to be proactive in our pandemic response as the precious lives of the people are at stake,” he noted.