President Rodrigo Duterte placed his hometown Davao City back under a general community quarantine (GCQ) until Nov. 30 due to a spike in COVID-19 cases, Malacanang announced Friday.
In a statement, presidential spokesman Harry Roque said Melquiades Feliciano, deputy chief implementer of the National Task Force (NTF) against COVID-19 for the cities of Bacolod and Cebu, has been assigned to head the Coordinated Operations to Defeat the Epidemic (CODE) teams that will be deployed in Davao City to assist in the response activities.
GCQ is the third strictest in a 4-level lockdown scheme, Roque said.
Only select businesses are allowed to operate at full capacity in GCQ areas.
“A One Hospital Command Center will likewise be established in the city to ensure an efficient referral system as private hospitals are mandated to increase their ward bed occupancy by at least 20 percent to 30 percent,” Roque said.
The Palace official said shortages of nurses medical equipment and drugs will also be addressed.
Accommodation establishments in the city will be tapped to serve as quarantine facilities for health workers as well as the isolation of positive COVID-19 cases.
Local officials will enforce granular lockdowns on affected communities in the city.
The Department of Health said there are 5,541 total COVID-19 cases in Davao City or nearly 70 percent of the total coronavirus infections in the entire Davao Region.
Meanwhile, researchers from the University of the Philippines who have been tracking the pandemic noted a decline in infections in Baguio City, which was recently tagged as a coronavirus hotspot.
The OCTA group — composed of professors from the University of the Philippines, the University of Santo Tomas, and Providence College in the United States — reached its findings with data from two to three weeks ago, said Baguio City Mayor Benjamin Magalong.
The city in October saw two major outbreaks that caused about 57 coronavirus cases a day, he said.
But after tightening its border control, new cases have gone down to about 29 a day in the last two weeks. On Thursday, the city recorded only 14 new infections, Magalong said.
“It appeared that the city was high-risk, which is true. Our cases really spiked. But for the past two weeks, we had a downtrend and we showed it to the Department of Health,” Magalong said in a government briefing.
The OCTA group also tagged Davao City as a hotspot, leading to its GCQ restrictions.
The Philippines logged 1,639 new cases of COVID-19 Friday, bringing the total to 415,067, after eight laboratories failed to submit reports, the Department of Health (DOH) said.
The DOH also reported that 305 persons have recovered, bringing to 375,237 the number of patients who have survived the disease.
The DOH also reported 27 new fatalities, bringing the death toll to 8,025.
This left 31,805 active cases, of which 84.7 percent are mild; 8.1 percent are asymptomatic; 4.5 percent are critical; 2.4 percent are severe; and 0.21 percent are moderate.
In other developments:
* Airlines operating domestic flights are no longer required to convert a section of the aircraft cabin into an isolation area for passengers or crew who display COVID-19 symptoms. In a resolution, the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) said such a measure “shall no longer be mandated to be part of the COVID-19 health protocols.” The change in policy was endorsed by the Department of Transportationand the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines.
* Local government units may relax age restrictions for tourists in areas under modified general community quarantine, according to the IATF. Persons below 15 years old and those who are over 65 years old are generally required to stay at home even under MGCQ, which is the least restrictive in the government’s four-tier quarantine classification system. However, the age restrictions may be relaxed for tourism purposes upon the determination of LGUs, and subject to prior consultation with the Tourism, Health, and the Interior and Local Government departments and the development of specific guidelines, the IATF said in a resolution.