The Department of Science and Technology (DOST) has created an online portal to facilitate contact tracing for all returning residents in the Eastern Visayas (Region 8).

The system will register vehicles used by returning residents, seat number, permanent address, and the quarantine facility where they will stay for 14 days.

DOST Eastern Visayas regional director Ernesto Granada said on Tuesday information which will be encoded in the portal will be screened by the DOST before posting online.

Each agency that belongs to the Regional Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) on Emerging Infectious Diseases will assign one encoder and one approver.

The information will be forwarded to the DOST as the main administrator of the portal before uploading to the website balik-otso.ph.

“There is data privacy since netizens will just see the maps and magnitude of cases in an area. The public has no access to personal information,” Granada told reporters.

Granada said only member-agencies of regional IATF will have access to personal information of returning residents.

The public can only view graphs and the number of cases for each province and city.

The regional IATF launched the system named “Balik-Otso” (back to Region 8) on Monday at the Leyte Park Hotel to heighten the monitoring of arrivals of locally-stranded individuals (LSIs), overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), and Balik Probinsya, Balik Pag-asa (BP2) program beneficiaries.

Granada added that they will continue to improve the features of the portal, which will include the online registration of returning residents and issuance of Quick Response (QR) code, replicating the process of LSI documentation in Cebu.

From June 6 to June 30, the Eastern Visayas Emergency Operation Center (EOC) of the Office of Civil Defense has monitored the arrival of 5,217 LSIs, 631 OFWs, and one BP2 beneficiary.

Local government units and the Overseas Worker Welfares Administration provided the data to the EOC.

As of July 14, Eastern Visayas has 653 confirmed Covid-19 cases, including 607 recoveries and three deaths.

Of the six provinces in the region, Leyte has the most number of cases with 396, Samar with 119, Southern Leyte with 89, Biliran with 26, Northern Samar with 22, and Eastern Samar with three cases. (PNA)