NOTE: THIS STORY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE BOHOL CHRONICLE’S SUNDAY PRINT EDITION.

An Interior and Local Government key official here has asked local government units to fast track the uploading of their vaccination data on the proper website. 

The call, issued by Department of Interior and Local Government Provincial Director Jerome Gonzales came immediately after the proliferation of fake travel documents haunted the systems Bohol put up to screen those who come in from other islands. 

The DILGs call also became even more relevant when Governor Arthur Yap issued Executive Order No 52, series of 2021. 

The said EO lifted the costly requirement of presenting a negative for coronavirus disease (COVID) test result through Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR), for fully vaccinated individuals entering Bohol.

Obtaining that document proved costly as in private hospitals and clinics, an RT-PCR test can fetch as high as P3800 to P2,800 and this has to be taken 72 hours prior to boarding the boat or plane to Bohol. 

If during the test, the individual yields a positive result, then a quarantine would be implemented, and not only can he be denied travel, he could also be asked for another RT-PCR test after five days in quarantine. 

As returning residents who have been stranded someplace else were excited to learn of the lifting of the RT-PCR requirement, the issue of obtaining the valid and authenticated vaccination certificate proved another hurdle. 

A process that gets the traveler to go online to www.vaxcert.doh.gov.ph so he could process the generation of his vaccination certificate using his vaccination card details, complaints soon surfaced about their records not being found. 

The fault failed travelers note, is that some local government units conducting vaccination failed to encode the vaccination records on time so that there are still LGUs who have not shared their data into the Vaccination Administration System set up by the Department of Information Communication and Technology. 

According to the DICT, vaccination information is supposed to be encoded and uploaded through a DICT created the portal vaslinelist.dict.gov.ph  for this specific data. 

But for LGUs, lack of technical manpower at a time when its resources are in for the vaccination operations have been their reason for failure to upload the data. 

For this, the return of Boholanos again has been stalled, pending the generation of these records that would put in the data in the tough to fake vaccination certificate.  

For this, DILG said LGUs must fast-track the data encoding and uploading because people are now poised to travel with the bans getting eased.  

And if the travel is necessary and could not wait for the process, sources at the Bohol Inter-Agency task Force suggest going back to the vaccine administering Rural Health Unit or health facility and ask their encoders to upload the needed data for the generation of the vaccine certificate for immediate travel.

The faster way to resolve the No Record Found is to talk to the focal person-encoder of the LGU where you had your vaccination to act on the request, and immediately encode and upload or correct erroneous entry to your vaccination data, the BIATF source said. 

Meanwhile, separate sources shared that the DICT has adopted a new and real-time encoding system during vaccination operations.  

This, they said would solve the issue of late encoding and uploading of data. (rahc/PIA-7/Bohol)