Quezon City Mayor Joy Belmonte has issued revised guidelines on general community quarantine while ordering cinemas and arcades to remain closed.
She said business establishments are now required to use the KyusiPass digital contact tracing app for their employees and consumers to further strengthen the city’s contact-tracing capability amid the rise in the number of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases.
She issued the directive, among others, in the revised guidelines released on March 5 in relation to the latest issuances by the Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases and Department of Trade and Industry.
KyusiPass, a contact tracing app powered by SafePass, can help the city keep track of the visitors of every establishment within its jurisdiction.
“As far as practicable, all business establishments in Quezon City must use our KyusiPass app to make contact tracing easier and faster for early detection of the virus,” Belmonte said.
She ordered business owners and operators to secure a dedicated QR Code per establishment from the Business Permits and Licensing Department to tag its location.
“For clarity, a lessee inside a larger establishment, like individual stores inside malls, should have its own contact tracing] log,” she cited.
Establishments that rely on manual contact tracing must encourage their customers to bring their own pen for logging in their name, address, and contact number.
Digital copies of the logs should be readily available to the City Epidemiology and Disease Surveillance Unit for any given time should contact tracing be necessary.
Meanwhile, Belmonte said indoor cinemas, video and game arcades, theme parks and funfairs must remain closed pending evaluation of the recent surge in COVID-19 cases.
The DTI, through its Memorandum Circular 21-08 allowed the opening of movie houses in areas under general community quarantine starting March 5.
But Belmonte opted to “err on the side of caution amid the sudden surge in the number of COVID-19 cases.”
“We are very alarmed by the latest spike in cases and we will not allow this surge to continue. We do not want to experience the ordeal of having all our hospitals overwhelmed by patients, so we will employ all means to stop it,” she said.
She ordered CESU to keep monitoring the surge as this may have been caused by the presence of new COVID-19 variants.