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Friday, March 29, 2024

Taguig turns to ‘SMART’

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The Taguig City government has intensified its campaign and strengthened testing capacity to further prevent the spread of coronavirus disease in the city.

“We adopt the national policy—the secret, the strategy and the secret formula is really to be able to practice test, trace and treat—from Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) to Modified ECQ, General GCQ, MGCQ to the new normal,” said Mayor Lino Edgardo Cayetano in a meeting with officials of Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID) in Fort Bonifacio on Tuesday.

Also present during the meeting were National Task Force against COVID-19 chief implementer Secretary Carlito Galvez, Interior Secretary Eduardo Año, Health Secretary Francisco Duque and Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque.

Cayetano said the strategy was incorporated in the approach dubbed as the Systematic, Mass Approach Responsible Testing (SMART) program which features hospital testing, house-to-house testing, community-based testing through health centers, and drive-thru testing.

He said the city government deployed 128 swabbers and its testing capacity increased from 1,000 to 2,000 a day.

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The Enderun Mega Swabbing Center is at Fort Bonifacio, Taguig City, and has a total of 54 swabbing booths that can accommodate a minimum of 900 clients per day.

"As of July 12, we have conducted 18,503 PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests, which is 2.31 percent of our local population,” saidCayetano.

Cayetano said the 12 members of the City Epidemiology Disease Surveillance Unit (CEDSU), 33 Emergency Response for Notifiable and Emerging Diseases (ERNIE) teams (with 166 members), 31 Barangay Health Emergency Response teams (with 155 members), 819 barangay health workers and the citizens are working together to boost tracing efforts.

“We have case managers, data analyst, security officers and (they have something like a) coordinator. We urge the public for their full cooperation. This is so the city government can immediately conduct contact tracing, testing, and if needed, impose a localized quarantine, which may mean imposing a quarantine on a house, a unit, a building or a street,” he said.

For instance, Cayetano said COVID-19 infections in a construction site in Barangay Fort Bonifacio had already been contained.

He added that most of the infected construction workers were asymptomatic.

For the 'treat' strategy, Cayetano announced they had additional quarantine facilities for COVID-19 patients and suspected cases that would be established in Bonifacio Global City and in Lakeshore.

"In line with the direction of the national government of aggressively isolating those who are sick, we will have a 100-bed quarantine facility in BGC and 500-bed quarantine facility run by the local government in Lakeshore," Cayetano said.

He said the two facilities could be created within a month.

At present, Taguig already has four isolation facilities, which include a 40-bed facility in Lakeshore that offers hygiene kits, towels, kits with masks and thermometers, bedside table, chair, and cabinets for each cubicle.

So far, the city recorded 1,578 COVID-19 cases, with 610 recoveries and 23 deaths.

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