DAVAO CITY – Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio had issued Executive Order No. 33, series of 2020 setting the guidelines for the implementation of General Community Quarantine in the city from May 16 to 31, 2020 following the new quarantine classification set by the national Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases last week.
The easing out of the lockdown in the city has allowed his father, President Rodrigo R. Duterte to return home for the weekend after about two months of quarantine inside Malacañang Palace to attend to the myriad problems facing the country and his administration due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Next week, the president would face congress to appeal for additional funding for some 5 million families who were sidelined during the earlier distribution of aid from the Social Amelioration Program.
But Mayor Duterte-Carpio warns the people not be complacent with the new classification because she ordered law enforcement authorities to be stricter in the implementation of the guidelines in the new Executive Order. In a published report on May 15, Mayor Sara revealed that three passengers from the Department of Transportation (DOTr) mercy flight on Tuesday, May 12, were tested positive of Covid-19 on a confirmatory polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test at the Southern Philippines Medical Center (SPMC).
Mayor Duterte-Carpio said during a radio interview that the three confirmed passengers failed in the initial health screening upon arriving in the city so they had to be brought to SPMC for additional testing. These new discoveries brought the number of Covid-19 positive cases in Davao City as of May 14 to 171.
With this development, the mayor ordered the intensification of screening of probable and suspected Covid-19 patients in the city by mobilizing the District Health Units of the City Health Office (CHO) to conduct contact tracing and screening using the rapid test kits (RDT).
On May 13, Buhangin District-CHO conducted screening tests to about 20 probable persons in an apartment in Buhangin Proper but the results showed negative. Buhangin Proper is among the High Risk barangays in the city with six confirmed cases of Covid-19 positive.
