ALTHOUGH the Covid-19 pandemic is keeping Guam and the CNMI apart, Gov. Ralph DLG Torres told the people and the government of the neighboring island, “We are with you.”
Ralph DLG Torres
The governor was invited to speak in the Rotary Club of Guam’s virtual meeting and discuss how the Commonwealth is dealing with the pandemic. As of Thursday, Guam reported a total of 7,052 Covid-19 cases with 115 deaths, 555 cases in active isolation and 6,382 not in active isolation. The CNMI, for its part, had recorded 113 cases, two deaths and eight persons in isolation.
During the virtual meeting, Gov. Torres also fielded questions from Guam reporters and Rotary Club members about the ongoing efforts to reopen the CNMI to visitors.
He told them that the goal of the CNMI is to establish a “new normal” in tourism industry that will ensure the safety of visitors and the local community.
He said in the CNMI, “we’re fighting Covid-19 together and not each other.”
He added, “To the members of the Rotary Club of Guam and to all our brothers and sisters of Guahan, we stand with you to share the lessons we have learned through this trial, and to learn from each other…. I have seen the power of communities coming together to face this challenge. Although this pandemic has kept us apart, I believe that we are one Marianas community, and we will emerge from this even stronger than before. We are with you.”
He recalled that the Federal Emergency Management Agency initially projected the CNMI to have 6,000 to 8,000 Covid-19 cases by June “if we didn’t put any plans or mitigation in place.”
“Here in the CNMI,” Torres said, “our mindset was this: One case in the CNMI is one case too many. We are a community that is very vulnerable to Covid-19, and if we weren’t proactive, our already fragile island healthcare system would have been overwhelmed. So that’s what we did.”
He said the “spread of misinformation is just as dangerous as the virus itself, so we made sure that public information was tight, accurate, and wide-reaching so that everyone was readily informed.”
Torres said the CNMI has “a system that is working because of the hard work and leadership of our [Commonwealth Healthcare Corp.] CEO, Covid-19 Task Force chairman, the governor’s authorized representative, our Legislature, our medical heroes and first responders, and our community who have taken this crisis seriously and done their part to protect their neighbors.”
