Mayor Edwin Olivarez of Paranaque City assured his constituents that he will not declare any kind of lockdown until May 15 despite a confirmation from the Department of Health that one barangay in the city has one of the highest numbers of Covid-19 cases in Metro Manila.
Olivarez said that placing a community under a total or hard lockdown is not the proper solution to the pandemic as long as the patient is still staying in the area and was brought to an isolation facility.
The DOH has reported that National Capital Region accounted for 67 percent of confirmed cases of Covid-19 disease, the highest in the country, as of May 3.
Three barangays in Metro Manila registered the most cases of Covid-19: Addition Hills in Mandaluyong City with 55, Tandang Sora in Quezon City with 52 and San Antonio, Paranaque with 50.
Barangay Addition Hills will be placed under a one-week total lockdown from May 7 to 14.
“Wuhan-style lock lockdown is not needed this time to fortify the fight against the coronavirus outbreak. What we need are random rapid testings of about 20,000 residents of Barangay San Antonio,“ Olivarez said.
“Residents of San Antonio will criticize us and get mad on us if we implement a hard lockdown right now or on the last 10 days of enhance community quarantine. All we need to do is to isolate the positive patients in the barangay,” he explained.
As of Tuesday, the number of confirmed cases in Parañaque is 481 including 33 record of fatalities while 82 patients have been discharged from the hospitals and 88 recovered patients.
The number of suspect cases is 584 while the probable cases is now 590. On the other hand, the cleared suspect cases are 298 and cleared probable cases is 276 in the city’s 16 barangays.
Olivarez also announced that the city government has already finished conducting mass rapid testing on about 3,321 individuals, 95 percent of whom tested negative.
He said about 590 individuals that are probable cases were automatically confined at the isolation facilities designated by the city government.
The city chief executive said frontline medical and health workers whose expertise was to save lives are now threatened to be infected with the virus. He admitted that about 40 health providers tested positive with the virus but were subjected to confirmatory test and are waiting for the results.
He added that the city has a total of 333 doctors and health providers deployed at their designated quarantine facilities attending to the needs of patients.