Pasig City has trained more than 200 contact tracers to ramp up its capability of tracing those exposed to confirmed cases of coronavirus disease (COVID-19).
During the period of the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ), Mayor Vico Sotto said personnel of the City Epidemiology and Surveillance Unit (CESU) could still cope with the demands of their work.
But following the easing of quarantine measures in Metro Manila to general community quarantine (GCQ), Sotto lamented that COVID-19 cases in the city have increased.
With the recent spike of cases, Sotto said Pasig’s CESU staff are overworked.
“Kaya kailangan nila ng tulong upang mapaganda ang responde at pag-monitor natin ng mga kaso (So they need help to improve our response and the monitoring of cases),” he wrote in a Facebook post.
“Kailangang-kailangan natin ang karagdagang contact tracers na ‘to (We really needed these additional contact tracers),” he added.
Sotto said the new sets of contact tracers were supposed to be deployed to the barangays to conduct a comprehensive city survey.
“They are originally team leaders and enumerators. They were supposed to conduct a comprehensive city survey, but given the situation we re-trained them as contact tracers,” the mayor said.
“We also need the data they would have collected, but we have postponed for the meantime because it is still dangerous,” he added.
As of July 29, Pasig City has 1,670 confirmed cases of COVID-19, 741 recoveries, 111 deaths, and 818 active cases, the local government reported.