Koronadal City, South Cotabato – The Bacolod City Emergency Operations Center (EOC) Task Force members unanimously agreed to adopt the South Cotabato COVID-19 Contact Tracing System (SC-CCTS), as announced during their regular meeting on September 22, 2020 at the New Government Center, Bacolod City.
The meeting was led by Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) Visayas Chief Implementer Major General Mel Feliciano, and attended by Dr. Ralph Nico Selibio, Philippine consultant of World Health Organization on COVID-19 response, Ms. Mia Feliciano, Vice Mayor El Cid Familiaran, assistant head of EOC TF, City Administrator Em Ang, City Health Officer Dr. Ma. Carmela Gensoli, City Health Office (CHO) swabbers, Councilor Lady Gles Pallen, EOC Cluster deputies, City Hall department and office heads, and executive assistants.
“Early last month, while we were in the process of intensifying our contact tracing efforts, I came across an online article about the contact tracing system developed by South Cotabato. I shared the article with members of our data management cluster and they agreed that it is an easy, accessible and fool-proof system. We started linking with the people who designed and developed the app. Mayor Bing Leonardia wasted no time and personally contacted South Cotabato Gov. Reynaldo Tamayo, Jr., who readily agreed to share the system with Bacolod,” City Administrator Ms. Em Ang stated on a Facebook post.
“We plan to adopt the SC-CCTS as our online contact tracing system to record the movement of residents around Bacolod City and elsewhere in the province and to easily locate people suspected of having had contacts with COVID-19 patients,” she added.
South Cotabato Provincial Government’s Information and Communication Division virtually met with the members of the Emergency Operations Center Task Force, and in the afternoon of the same day, the Information Technology (IT) personnel of the province conducted a technical orientation on the IT team of Bacolod City Local Government Unit (LGU).
“Barring any delays, we plan to start using the CTTS within the week. With this development, we hope to be able to gradually open our economy as we already have an effective tracking system in place. By the way, we will name our system Bacolod City COVID-19 Contact Tracing System or BaC-TraC for short,” Ang further declared.
