Malacañang on Monday issued a directive to place the entire province of Bohol under the less stringent Alert Level 2 starting February 16 amid the continued drop in the number of new cases of COVID-19 in the province.

Bohol has been under Alert Level 3 since January 16, during the post-Christmas season surge of coronavirus cases in the province and the rest of the country.

According to Malacañang, the new alert level will take effect on February 16 until February 28.

“[Alert Level 2] refers to areas wherein case transmission is low and decreasing, healthcare utilization is low, or case counts are low but increasing or case counts are low and decreasing but total bed utilization rate and intensive care unit utilizations is increasing,” the national Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) said in its definition of the alert level.

Data from the Bohol IATF Emergency Operations Center (EOC) showed that Bohol has 453 active COVID-19 cases as of Tuesday morning, down from over a thousand last month.

It was also noted that hospitals in the province have more unused COVID-19 beds.

The Governor Celestino Gallares Memorial Hospital, the province’s COVID-19 referral facility, only had 52 beds, or 52.5 percent of its 99 total bed capacity for coronavirus patients, occupied as of Tuesday morning.

In January, the GCGMH was consistently nearing full capacity based on the BIATF-EOC’s real-time monitoring of hospital occupancy.

Meanwhile, the national government also placed most of the entire country under Alert Level 2 as the number of new infections of the disease continued its downtrend nationwide.

Only Iloilo City, Iloilo Province, Guimaras, Zamboanga City, Davao De Oro, Davao Occidental and South Cotabato remained under Alert Level 3.  

No areas have been classified under Alert Level 1.