Bacolod City, like many hospitals, treatment facilities and local governments all over the country, is also losing a lot of health frontliners due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

And as of yesterday, the city government is still waiting for Department of Health’s (DOH) reply to its request for additional health workers.

In an interview with Noli De Castro broadcasted live nationwide over DZMM and the Kapamilya Channel yesterday morning, Mayor Evelio Leonardia said that he had already written the regional office of the DOH whose assistance he sought to hire more nurses and other medical frontliners to attend to COVID-19 cases.

“We are still awaiting DOH’s reply to our request regarding additional health workers. We also asked the health department for machines and equipment such as ventilators,” the mayor said.

He further told De Castro he does not have the absolute number on the actual shortage of health workers but pointed out that with 275 beds allotted for COVID in various hospitals, only 230 personnel are available for now.

Hospital occupancy, he continued, has already reached a critical level at 87 percent.

“That is why we already sounded the alarm bells to the DOH,” he said.

Meanwhile, Leonardia shared that the new alert level system being carried out recently by the National Inter-Agency Task Force is not new to Bacolod City.

While Bacolod City is currently under general community quarantine with heightened restrictions (GCQ-HR) status, the DOH had placed it under Alert Level 4 together with the provinces of Negros Occidental and Iloilo and Iloilo City, among others.

Alert Level 4 is the highest alert level for COVID-19

As of yesterday, Bacolod City has 1,854 active COVID-19 cases following the 83 new cases./WDJ