BRIGHT CAPITOL The provincial capitol of Iloilo province is awash with lights that put the restored building in the spotlight. (File photo by NESTOR P. BURGOS / Inquirer Visayas)
ILOILO CITY, Iloilo, Philippines — As the national pandemic task force eased the face mask policy in the country, Iloilo Gov. Arthur Defensor Jr. has also allowed the voluntary use of masks in outdoor areas in the province.
The governor, however, still required people in the province’s 42 towns and its component city to properly wear “well-fitted masks in indoor private or public establishments, including in public transportation by land, air or sea.”
Defensor said his decision to relax the face mask policy came after COVID-19 cases in the province have dwindled as well as the recommendation of the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) to allow the optional wearing of masks outdoors.
“The national government already made the pronouncement from the Inter-Agency Task Force and was verbally approved by our President [Ferdinand Marcos Jr.]. As to our COVID-19 cases, we can see that we have been going down, we are monitoring our health-care utilization and it has also been going down,” the governor said here on Friday.
The IATF issued its recommendation to ease the mask policy after Cebu Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia and Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama signed separate orders, in June and September this year, respectively, allowing the non-wearing of masks in open spaces.
On Sept. 7, Defensor became the third local chief executive in the country who issued an executive order amending the COVID-19 regulations to ease the mask mandate.
As of Sept. 10, Iloilo province has 829 active infections out of 47,356 COVID-19 cases recorded since the pandemic struck in March 2020, according to the Department of Health (DOH) in Western Visayas.
The Iloilo Provincial Health Office said 1.28 million individuals in the province were fully vaccinated, 259,113 others have received their first booster shots, while 14,259 got their second booster shots.
Confident
In Baguio City, Mayor Benjamin Magalong urged the city council to amend the city’s coronavirus protocols in anticipation of Malacañang formalizing the policy that would make the wearing of face masks optional in open spaces.
Magalong, the country’s former contact tracing czar, said he was confident that Baguio’s high immunization rate would help residents withstand potential transmissions once the mask mandate is relaxed.
As of Sept. 9, the DOH said Baguio has exceeded this year its vaccination target of 268,022 adults by completing the jabs of 339,333 individuals or a 126.61-percent performance rate.
3 more months
But one of the city’s top data analysts suggested easing the Baguio mask rule after a three-month period of observation to allow government doctors and epidemiologists to measure the impact of the start of the school year on public health.
Math professor Rizavel Addawe of the University of the Philippines Baguio said giving residents a mask option now might not be the best time.
“I am not a doctor. But as I see the data, I think it’s too early to relax the restrictions on wearing masks, especially today that we have opened [in-person] classes for elementary and high school. I think we should observe restrictions until we see that the lowering of infections is stable,” said Addawe on Friday.
Addawe formed a volunteer group of experts to explore, track and study the COVID-19 spread in Baguio. Her inputs shaped the day-to-day responses to the disease’s transmission after the pandemic broke out.
The mountain city has 94 active COVID-19 patients as of Sept. 10, six of them suffering reinfection, which raised the city’s tally to 44,343 cases since 2020.
In Davao City, the local government has decided to wait until December this year to lift the ordinance that mandated the compulsory wearing of face masks in public places.
Mayor Sebastian Duterte supported the recommendation of Dr. Ashley Lopez, acting head of the City Health Office, who asked the city to extend the mandatory wearing of face masks up to the end of the year, at least as threats of COVID-19 remained.
Wait and see
“The way I see it, it is okay [to extend the face mask policy until December] because I [still] want to look at the experiences of those provinces, towns and cities that do away with the wearing of face masks,” Duterte said on Friday.
“If we see that their experience [of not wearing face masks does not result in the surge of cases, then, it] is okay, we may follow them. [But] I don’t want us to [do away with face masks now],” he added.
Duterte added that COVID-19 had already wrought such effects on the city’s economy in the last two years that he could not risk inviting another surge by coming up with a hasty decision.
Although the COVID-19 infection rate in the city has gone down, Lopez said there were still 114 new COVID-19 cases reported as of Sept. 7, bringing to 610 the total number of active COVID-19 cases in the city on that day alone.
—WITH REPORTS FROM VINCENT CABREZA AND CARMELITO Q. FRANCISCO
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