Central Mindanao digital contact tracing app gains headway
Local News • 14:30 PM Fri Sep 4, 2020
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By:
John M. Unson
Koronadal City-based broadcast journalist Marivic Advencula, of station dxOM-FM, shows her contact tracing card.
COTABATO CITY --- Authorities in South Cotabato province and in Cotabato City are fighting the COVID-19 with a foolproof online contact tracing system as passports for residents and transients moving around.
Cotabato City Mayor Cynthia Guiani-Sayadi launched last month a domestic coronavirus containment contact tracing app as requisite for entrance to shopping malls, government offices, hospitals and other establishments providing services via personal interface transactions.
Guiani-Sayadi is chairperson of the inter-agency city disaster risk reduction and management council, whose anti-COVID-19 efforts for Cotabato City’s 37 barangays are supported by the police and the Philippine Navy’s 2nd Marine Battalion.
Thousands of Cotabato City residents now carry cards bearing their contact tracing codes.
The cards are recorded on mobile phones of anti-COVID 19 frontliners each time residents submit to inspection.
It was the provincial government of South Cotabato that pioneered such a contact tracing system.
The office of South Cotabato Gov. Reynaldo Tamayo, Jr. first tested the system in the provincial capital, Koronadal City, seat of Administrative Region 12, early on.
The digital tracking system records the movement of residents around Koronadal City and elsewhere in the province to easily locate people suspected of having had contacts with COVID-19 patients.
The contact tracing system is now being used extensively in Cotabato City and in South Cotabato province.
The inter-agency, multi-sector Regional Development Council-12, or RDC-12, supports the anti-COVID-19 efforts of the Cotabato City local government unit and the South Cotabato provincial government via a platform espoused by the Department of Information and Communications Technology, or DICT.
In a statement Friday, the National Economic Development Authority-12 said the RDC-12 acknowledges the importance of a digital contact tracing system in the government’s war on coronavirus.
The NEDA-12 said the council also supports the contact tracing campaigns of the Department of Health-12.
The DOH-12 organized in recent weeks 734 teams with 4,381 frontliners now actively involved in tracking central Mindanao residents suspected of having contracted COVID-19.
Photo: Koronadal City-based broadcast journalist Marivic Advencula, of station dxOM-FM, shows her contact tracing card.