Cebu Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia (Photo from her Facebook account)
CEBU CITY. Cebu, Philippines — Two top government officials in Cebu welcomed the national government’s recent directive to allow the optional use of face masks indoors.
Cebu Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia and Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama, the first local government officials who eased the face mask policy ahead of the rest of the country, said relaxing the restriction was the appropriate thing to do now.
Garcia thanked President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. for the new policy as it showed the country was moving on from the COVID-19 pandemic and was heading toward economic recovery.
“First of all, this is in keeping with other countries that have moved on. Because if we continue to be shackled by these fears and even [have to take] RT-PCR (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) tests every time we see each other and all of these face masks, which is just a continued business for some, we ask the question: What was the vaccination for?” she said on Oct. 26.
She added: “What was the aggressive push for not just two doses but even booster shots up to, what do they have now, they have a bivalent, they keep on creating more and more innovations in so far as dealing with COVID-19 is concerned.”
‘Open, open, open’
Rama said people have already grown tired of talking and hearing about the COVID-19 virus and the pandemic.
“Our thrust now is economic recovery. We will open, open, open [everything],” Rama said in a separate interview on Thursday.
Garcia pointed out that the wearing of face masks for more than two years was already enough. She said there could be hazards to one’s own health as “you continue to breathe in the fibers of these masks including whatever chemicals were used.”
Michael Rama (Photo courtesy of CDNDIGITAL)
“For those who wish to cling on to the memory of COVID-19 for their own selfish and perhaps pecuniary interest, you are but a few. I think the rest of the country and the greater population have already seen that we cannot continue to live in the abnormal way that we have been living for the past two and a half years. We should be back to normalcy by now,” the governor said.
Can’t be left behind
Garcia warned that if the country would refuse to move on from the pandemic, the Philippines would be left far behind by the rest of the countries in the world.
Both Garcia and Rama said they would no longer issue separate executive orders on the optional wearing of face masks indoors and would just wait for the national government to issue the new directive.
“Suffice it to say, as you can see here in Cebu, you know the wearing of face masks has become optional even in closed environments. So I do not need to up the ante and issue an EO. So we will just wait,” said the governor.
Garcia said she also trusts the new composition of the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) under the Marcos administration.
“We were always ahead [before]. But we have seen that with this new IATF composition, especially that there are secretaries out there that came from local governance. The secretary of the Department of Interior and Local Government was a mayor himself, the secretary of Tourism also served as mayor of Liloan. And we are noting with great joy that finally the policies of the IATF recognize what is actually happening on the ground,” she said.