With COVID-19 cases rising:
Will Bohol’s travel bubble burst into thin air?
Few hours after reporting that Bohol has 72 active COVID-19 cases as of August 27, 2020, the Provincial Government of Bohol had to revise its statistics within the same day to include additional 16 infections all from the town of Talibon which currently has the highest number of cases in the province.
Authorities are quick to issue a caveat that the new cases are a product of contact tracing activities. But the infection had already spread in Guindacpan, an island barangay in Talibon with a population of 2,216 (2015 Census) representing 3.31% of the town’s population before the infection cluster was discovered. Our local government officials are now racing against time to contain the infection, which has started to surface in the mainland barangays of San Jose, San Roque, and Tanghaligue.
Talibon Mayor Janette Aurestila-Garcia ordered the lockdown of the entire island barangay and the town’s Rural Health Unit because one of its personnel involved in contact tracing was infected. The mayor also temporarily stopped accepting locally stranded individuals due to a lack of workforce.
While the presence of two COVID-19 laboratories here has facilitated the fast release of test results, the effectiveness of the province’s contact tracing and containment capability in the face of a massive emerging infection still has to face the crucible of war against the invisible enemy. The good mayor’s honest revelation of the town’s vulnerability, that is, the lack of health and other personnel for contact tracing, isolation, and treatment, needs to be immediately addressed not just by the municipal government alone but also by the provincial and national governments as well.
The lack of workforce to respond to the crisis cannot be solved by only increasing their number. A strategy that can outsmart the virus is needed to beat this nonliving molecule.
The situation in Talibon now presents an opportunity for our local government units to apply and test what we have prepared in the first few months of the pandemic. Months ago, Bohol caught the national government’s attention because the province used to have a few cases only. No less than DILG Secretary Eduardo Año and Tourism Secretary Bernadette Romulo-Puyat came to check for possible travel bubble’s tourism sites. With COVID-19 cases rising in the northern part of the province, will Bohol’s tourism bubble just burst into thin air?
Although we have just put in place one part of the missing puzzle, the COVID testing laboratories, the other parts– isolation and treatment– still need to be tested in a baptism of fire. Two things may happen: one is when our systems fail, and the infections will continue to rise exponentially. The other is when we can keep the numbers low and gain more confidence to reopen our tourism-based economy.
We hope for the best to happen. In the meantime, we need to brace for a tough battle.