By Dolly Yasa
BACOLOD City – Two Cabinet officials arrived here yesterday, Aug. 26, 2020 in response to Mayor Evelio Leonardia’s “plea for help.”
Leonardia made an emergency and urgent appeal to President Rodrigo Duterte last Tuesday night to send an augmentation team of 150 nurses, 20 doctors, and 30 medical technologists from the Department of Health (DOH) to Bacolod as an “emergency stop-gap measure” before the city’s health care system bogs down due to COVID-19 pandemic.
A press statement from the Office of the Mayor said that in response to Leonardia’s appeal, Senator Bong Go informed the mayor that three Cabinet officials are arriving to meet with Bacolod City officials to assess the COVID-19 situation here, and to determine what immediate assistance the national government can give to the city to help stem the spread of the disease.
In a text message, Go told Leonardia that the contingent will be led by Presidential Assistant for the Visayas Secretary Michael Lloyd Dino and Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu, who was also sent by President Duterte to Cebu on a special mission to help them at the height of the COVID crisis there.
They will be joined by Gen. Mel Feliciano, Cimatu’s partner in the Cebu mission, the statement added.
Dino promised the mayor that the national government “will go all the way” and give “full support” to help Bacolod City.
Gen. Robert Ancan, of the AFP Visayas Command Center in Cebu, also promised to field, as soon as possible, a medical team composed of army doctors, nurses, and support health workers to augment the dwindling number of medical health workers here who were stricken with COVID-19 themselves or have resigned.
Ancan further assured the mayor of further medical equipment support after an evaluation.
In a phone call to Leonardia, Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr. of the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process (OPAPP), who is also the chief implementer of the National Task Force on COVID-19, promised to catch up with the Thursday meeting of city officials with Secretary Dino.
But if he cannot make it, Galvez assured the mayor that he will come to Bacolod next week.
Galvez also promised Leonardia “to deploy Region 7 nurses and doctors there (Bacolod)” and that he will also arrange with DOH Region 6 to bring in more medical personnel to help fill the gap in the City’s need for more doctors and nurses.
He will also put in place, through DOH Region 6, arrangements with certain Bacolod hotels to serve as “bend-down” facilities to take in recovering COVID patients who will be discharged earlier from hospitals, so that hospital beds can be freed to admit new critically-ill COVID patients.
Galvez also assured Leonardia that he will “deploy 5 High-Flow Nasal Cannula” to the Corazon Locsin Montelibano Memorial Regional Hospital and facilitate that the said hospital will have stocks of Remdesivir, an antiviral drug now used for seriously-ill COVID patients.
