BY ADRIAN P. NEMES III
Some 8,216 out of 23,545 establishments in Bacolod, or about 34.9 percent, have been registered in the city’s baCTrac system, as of this month.
But Dr. Chris Sorongon, deputy for medical and data analysis of the Emergency Operations Center said yesterday that they have yet to identify how many of these establishments with baCTrac are actually using the application.
Sorongon said he already asked the person in charge at the Management Information Technology and Computer Services Department to provide the list, adding that the data will still come from South Cotabato, from which the system was borrowed.
He urged business establishments to register with the baCTrac, especially since all individuals who will enter business establishments in Bacolod will be required to use the system, whether they are city residents or not, by March 1.
Under City Ordinance 941 that took effect on Sept. 26 last year, all establishments are required to use the baCTrac, a web-based and mobile-based app developed for efficient and expeditious contact tracing of coronavirus positive patients in the city and allow the EOC Task Force to easily locate people who have had contacts with them.
Sorongon said they will intensify their monitoring operations in malls, terminals, and other establishments to ensure that the baCTrac is being used, and not just logbooks that are not submitted to the EOC.
He said they will utilize some of the new 90 contact tracers hired by the Department of the Interior and Local Government, and assigned to the EOC, in conducting the monitoring.
Sorongon also said that the newly-hired contact tracers will help them in the vaccination program of the city government.
MORE CASES
Twenty call center agents from Transcom Bacolod are now isolated after they came in close contact with seven of their colleagues, who recently tested positive for Covid-19.
They are part of the 121 agents who were swabbed because they were supposed to return to their onsite work on Tuesday, Sorongon said.
The agents will be quarantined for two weeks, while those who turn positive will need to be swabbed again after 14 days, and marked “recovered” if they yield negative results, he added.
With the seven new cases at Transcom, the number of its employees infected by Covid rose to 48. Transcom chief executive officer Mark Lyndsell said recently that they will shoulder the expenses for the vaccination of their employees.*
