Fully vaccinated overseas Filipinos who wish to go home to Cebu could soon have a shorter quarantine as the province's governor Gwendolyn Garcia pushed for changes in the protocol.
Garcia on Tuesday said she would issue a memorandum to allow returning overseas Filipinos, who are fully vaccinated, to have a shorter quarantine of five days instead of the seven days required by the national government.
"Vaccination is a personal choice and it should be incentivized," Garcia said earlier this week.
Under Garcia's proposal, fully vaccinated returning Filipinos from abroad will be swabbed upon arrival and will be placed on quarantine. Instead of being swabbed again on the seventh day, Garcia is proposing to have the second RT-PCR testing on the fifth day.
Persons who will test negative on the fifth day can be released immediately from quarantine, she said. Verification of vaccination documents will be done by the Bureau of Quarantine according to Garcia.
The Mactan-Cebu airport is the second busiest in the country with an average of 12 million passengers in a year before the pandemic, just behind the main gateway Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
The proposal comes as the country fights a renewed surge in COVID-19 cases driven mainly by the hyper-contagious coronavirus Delta variant.
The inter-agency task force on COVID-19 response earlier placed Cebu province under GCQ with heightened restrictions until the end of the month but Garcia issued an executive order easing the restrictions to just GCQ.