Oroquieta City taps free local app for contact tracing

ILIGAN CITY—The local government of Oroquieta City in Misamis Occidental is using an online application for its effort to trace contacts of persons infected with SARS Cov2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Mayor Lemuel Acosta recently signed an agreement to partner with Cosmotech Philippines Inc. for the use of an application called Traze.

The online application is free to download for Android and IOS devices and can be used by individuals, establishments, village governments, public transportation groups and delivery services crew.

“We are rolling this out and pushing it through because we are having a hard time in manual contact tracing,” Acosta said.

He said many COVID-19 patients are selective in information they share with contact tracers while others even lie about key details, making contact tracing difficult.

As of Oct. 13, Oroquieta City has 25 COVID-19 cases. A government official was the city’s first recorded death from the disease.

The youngest confirmed case is a one-year-old girl who arrived home at Lower Lamac village on Oct. 1 with her family from Caloocan City.

The girl’s father and grandmother tested positive for coronavirus, too, last Oct. 5, said Tommy Bualat, spokesperson for the local Inter Agency Task Force on COVID-19.

By Oct. 10, her girl’s mom was also found to have been infected.

As of Oct. 12, at least 13 employees of the provincial and city governments had tested positive for coronavirus, all believed to be cases of local transmission.

TSB