Valenzuela City has been seeing a continuous decrease in its new daily coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases for the past few weeks, according to Mayor Rex Gatchalian.
In a public briefing Thursday, Gatchalian bared that the city has 30 to 40 new cases a day, "not as bad as a couple of weeks ago" when they were still "averaging 60 to 80 cases in a day."
Gatchalian said the operation of the city's medical facilities dedicated for severe COVID-19 cases has started to "normalize" as they no longer get fully occupied as compared last month.
"Sa lungsod, 'yung mga hospitals natin medyo bumababa na yung operating capacity nila. Admittedly, last one month, medyo laging punuan, pero ngayon unti unti nang nagnonormalize kasi nakikita naman natin yan doon sa numero sa buong Metro Manila na pababa na (In the city, the operating capacity of our hospitals has already somehow decreased. Last month, they usually got fully occupied. But now, their operations have gradually normalized as we see in the decreasing number of new cases in Metro Manila)," he said.
But the city will not get too confident with its numbers. Gatchalian said both the local and the national government will add more quarantine facilities so they are prepared should there will be a spike in mild and asymptomatic cases.
"Nagtatayo pa ang pamahalaang national ng dalawa pa na isolation facilities as we speak (The national government is now building two more isolation facilities as we speak)," Gatchalian said. Currently, the city has 14 quarantine facilities with a total of 1,244 beds.
"Pagdating naman sa pagdagdag pa ng isolation facilities, sana di na kailangan, ibig sabihin, sana 'di na dumami. Pero nakahanda tayo, may buffer pa tayo na mga 200 beds, anytime pwede magoperate yang mga 'yan (We hope that we will no longer have more cases and have to build more. But we're ready anyway. We have 200 beds that can operate anytime) isolation facilities," he added.
Valenzuela City has already reported 5,659 COVID-19 cases but only 1,197 of them are active.