Go Says Duterte Acting on Bacolod’s Plea for Help; Cabinet Officials Arriving in City Tomorrow

President Rodrigo Duterte responded to the plea of Bacolod City for urgent help against COVID-19 in terms of medical personnel.

The Bacolod Public Information Office, in an early morning dispatch to newsmen today, said Senator Bong Go relayed the President’s response to Mayor Evelio Leonardia’s urgent appeal for help sent yesterday (August 25) to President Duterte.

Senator Go informed the mayor that three Cabinet officials are arriving to meet with Bacolod officials tomorrow (August 27) to assess the COVID-19 situation in the city, and to determine what immediate assistance the national government can give to the city to help stem the spread of COVID-19, the City PIO reported.

“Go, in a text message, 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, partner of Secretary Cimatu in the Cebu mission,” the PIO report said.

“The group will first visit Iloilo City today (August 26) before proceeding to Bacolod where they will hold separate meetings with officials of the City and those of the province,” it said.

Dino meanwhile promised the mayor that the national government “will go all the way” and give “full support” to help Bacolod.

Gen. Robert Ancan, of the AFP Visayas Command Center in Cebu, in a follow-up call to Leonardia, 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 are stricken with COVID-19 themselves or have resigned, the PIO report added.

Ancan further assured the mayor of further medical equipment support after an evaluation.

In another 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. However, 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.

It can be recalled that Leonardia made an emergency and urgent appeal to Duterte earlier yesterday to send to Bacolod, through the DOH, an augmentation team of 150 nurses, 20 doctors, and 30 medical technologists as an “emergency stop-gap measure” before the city’s health care system bogs down for lack of medical personnel in hospitals.

This appeal was made by the mayor because he was alarmed by the fact that last August 23, Bacolod hospitals had refused admission to new COVID patients saying they have already reached full capacity or that there are no more doctors and nurses to take care of new COVID patients.

“Our need for medical staff to fill up the gap in our hospitals is great, Mr. President. Patients have already died in their homes for failing to avail of emergency hospital services,” the mayor said.

These patients could have been given help had there been enough medical personnel in these hospitals, he added in his appeal.*