San Juan City Mayor Francis Zamora advised the Department of Health (DOH) to tally coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) infections based on the patients’ local residences and not on the hospitals they are currently in when analyzing the alert level of an area.
Zamora explained via in a dzBB interview that most of the hospitals in Metro Manila have patients outside the locality.
“Ang aking panawagan kung magta-tag ang DOH, i-tag nila ang patient na ito [My appeal to DOF is to tag patients] based on their place of residence and not based on the address of the hospital,” he said.
Zamora added that this would give local government units better information to decide their alert level.
The San Juan City chief executive noted that only 19 percent of the city’s Cardinal Santos Medical Center’s Covid-19 patients are residents of the city.
Those patients who are non-residents of San Juan pull the city’s higher alert level.
Metro Manila will be placed under Alert Level 4 starting September 16 as well as the launch of the granular lockdowns.
Alert Level 4 means that an area’s Covid-19 case count is high or increasing, while total hospital and ICU beds are at high utilization rate. Ronald Espartinez