Mayor Beng Climaco announced Monday that the city government will yet issue the guidelines on allowing children 5 and older out of their homes for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic broke out a year ago.

This, after the National Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Infectious Diseases recently authorized such a policy, but allowing the local government units to come up with their own guidelines.

Climaco told a radio interview that parents should wait for the guidelines before allowing their children to go to parks and other authorized places.

However, she stressed that while children are now free from the confines of their homes, they must be supervised by their parents or adults and follow the minimum public health standards, such as wearing facemasks, face shields and social-distancing.

Meanwhile, the mayor reiterated her appeal to the public to cooperate with law enforcers in the implementation of the health protocols even as the city's covid cases continue to drop, now at 257 active cases with 11,000 recoveries and 573 deaths as of July 10.

She lamented that the local police have logged 3,310 protocol violations last week. "The average rate of protocol violations is alarming because Covid-19 remains a clear and present threat with no end in sight yet," Climaco said.

Specifically, she raised the alarm over the increasing Covid-19 mortality cases in the city at 573, marking a 5% death rate, which is much higher than the national rate of 1.7% only.-(Vic Larato)

(Source: City Government of Zamboanga Facebook Page)