By Joseph B.A. Marzan
The chief of Iloilo Airport’s police forces addressed concerns on Friday about longer disembarkation times in commercial flights which also carry coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines in its cargo.
The Iloilo International Airport in Cabatuan, Iloilo is only one of two vaccine transit hubs in the region, the other being the Bacolod-Silay Airport in Silay City, Negros Occidental.
The first batch of COVID-19 vaccines in Iloilo arrived on Mar. 5 aboard Philippine Airlines commercial flight PR 2141 from Manila.
Upon arrival, passengers were not allowed to disembark until after the vaccines were loaded on to a refrigerated truck commissioned by the Office of Civil Defense-Region 6 (OCD-6), to be stored at the facilities of the Department of Health-Western Visayas Center for Health Development (DOH-WV CHD) in Iloilo City.
Iloilo Airport Police Station chief Major Ismael Gandarosa told Daily Guardian on Air on Friday that the Iloilo Airport headed by Airport Manager Manuela Palma formed a Technical Working Group (TWG) with subject matter experts from the airport’s safety and security clusters.
Gandarosa said that the TWG crafted interim guidelines for the handling of vaccines and other special cargo at the airport, absent uniform guidelines from the central office of the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP).
The CAAP operates and manages the Iloilo International Airport, among other domestic and international airports in other areas in the country.
Under the interim guidelines, and aside from the aforementioned rule on disembarkation, vehicular traffic within the airport complex is stopped for 5 minutes to allow the DOH and OCD vaccine convoys to transit out of the airport smoothly.
He added that the guidelines were made based on their assessment of their experience during the first arrival of the COVID-19 vaccines.
“We noticed during the first arrival of the vaccines in our facility that there were requirements in transporting the vaccines that were not addressed in our existing protocol,” Gandarosa said.
According to Gandarosa, the reason why vaccines arriving in Iloilo were transported only via Philippine Airlines was because their personnel and crew were trained in handling them.
TRAVELLING PUBLIC
As to commercial arrivals to the airport amid the pandemic, Gandarosa stated that they were “going back to normal”, compared to when flights were halted at the beginning of lockdowns.
There are still flights to Manila on a daily basis despite the pandemic, and sweeper flights carrying returning overseas Filipinos and locally-stranded individuals are still operating as well.
He also said that there have been confirmed COVID-19 cases among personnel at the airport, including the airport police, which he described as “inevitable”, but all of the close contacts had tested negative, which he attributed to their observation of minimum public heath standards.
“From our experience at the Iloilo Airport, there have been colleagues who have tested positive. It is part of our job, and we cannot avoid that we may get positive too. However, based on our experience, we are happy that our observation of minimum health standards has been effective.”
He advised the public who were travelling out of Iloilo to download the Department of Transportation’s Traze contact-tracing application on their smartphones.
“To our air travelling public, before you enter the airport, please download the Traze app, that is the app of the DOTr. At all our airports, we have a QR code, which you can only scan if you have the app,” he said.
