Astrodome, the wrong place

By Leonardo Micua

 

DID the city of Dagupan commit the mistake of making the Dagupan City People’s Astrodome as an additional isolation area for Patients Under Investigation (PUI) in the event the COVID-19 contagion in the city worsens?

Methinks that even if the Astrodome, as the site for 30 PUIs with mild symptoms in modular tents donated by businessman Rodolfo Du, meets the standard set by the Department of Health, the plight and health of personnel of several national government offices based in the Astrodome should have been considered.

Operating today in the Astrodome are offices of Bureau of Immigration, Philippine Information Agency, the provincial office of the Commission on Elections, the district office of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group and the Land Transportation Regulatory and Franchising Board (did I miss any?). I understand the City Library is also there.

PIA’s personnel and guests will be using the same restroom in the Astrodome that will be used by the PUIs. In such a case, the risk of having the infection spread will be high. Imagine the risks to the personnel of the national government agencies.

Then, how can the PIA and other agencies serve their daily large volume of respective clients, if they are to stop their operations because access to the Astrodome will already be limited and restricted to PUIs it being an isolation area?

This is aside from the fact that it is a stone’s throw from the Dagupan City National High School. The headquarters of the Girl Scouts of the Philippines, Dagupan chapter, is also adjacent to the Astrodome.   It is also located beside the busy Lingayen-Dagupan road on any normal day in Barangay Tapuac and there are commercial stores and the Lyceum Northwestern University in the area.

The officials of these national agencies may not have been consulted at all by Mayor Brian Lim when he installed the donated modular tents inside the Astrodome and only Archbishop Socrates Villegas was told because he was asked to bless the tents.

The Astrodome is in addition to the idle Arizona Inn in Bonuan Boquig (through the generosity of its owners) as a temporary isolation facility for PUIs and Persons Under Monitoring (PUM).

But like in the case of the Astrodome, the decision to make Arizona Inn an isolation area was not consulted with the barangay officials and its residents but reportedly only with the favored defeated candidate for barangay captain, not the one at the helm, obviously for political reasons. Aha!

At any rate, since the Bayanihan We Heal as One Act passed by Congress empowers the government to tap or lease private establishments such as in this case, the Arizona Inn for the purpose of preparing isolation areas for COVID-19 patients if needed, the city government should have opted to finding more idle motels and buildings in the city, than converting the Astrodome outright without the benefit of a longer study.

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With one confirmed COVID-19 patient dead from six positive cases, plus one dead PUI and nine PUIs under confinement as of 9:00 a.m. on April 11 according to the monitoring of the Provincial Health Office, Pangasinan’s eyes and attention is on Dagupan, as far as COVID-19 is concerned.    

The figures can speak for themselves. Dagupan is today’s epicenter for COVID-19. If this is not yet alarming for the city government, I don’t know what is. 

There is a video shared with us, and which we shared as well to some of our friends, that  repeatedly asks people to stay home, stay home, stay home because if we all do this, the coronavirus will die by itself since there is no more host to it. So if you want to be the next host of COVID-19, step out of your homes.  

Many still fail to understand the reasons for the 45-day Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) ordered by President Rodrigo Duterte.

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In New Zealand, where our close kin live and where people are also on home quarantine, its Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern calls those who break the quarantine rule “COVIDiots.”

New Zealand is also on total lockdown but it recently earned a recognition report from Washington Post: “New Zealand not only flattened the curve  but also squashed it” As of April 10, NZ listed only 1,132 cases with  just four deaths, all of them elderlies, and 422 already recovered.

New Zealand could be the world’s model for the whole world but Ms. Ardern humbly said “the country is modeling only for New Zealand,  its people, its economy”.

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