‘No overnight completion of ACS’

Two months after showing off the proposed Alternate Care Site at Kanoa Resort in Susupe, the facility is not fully complete yet. Warren Villagomez, who heads the Governor’s COVID-19 Task Force, now says that dealing with medical equipment is not an overnight process.

The facility was originally set for completion on May 25, which was then moved to May 28. At that time, Villagomez said that critical medical equipment were still on the way. This time, he says the medical equipment are still being put through their paces.

“You’ve got to go through parameter checks…and sometimes some equipment actually need to have pigments on them so there’re mannequins that we’re working with to assure that the limits on the machines are in place,” said Villagomez.

Additionally, he said that there are biomedical services—which provides support for biomedical equipment that provides services for the Commonwealth Healthcare Corp.—at Kanoa Resort, as well as facilitating all the needed work that needs to be done.

“It’s not an overnight completion. So it’s ongoing, it’s really much very active as we speak and it will [continue to] be active,” said Villagomez, even with patients that will be transferred over to the ACS.

As for as the quarantine site at the former Mariana Resort & Spa in Marpi, Villagomez said that it is on its final stage of being retrofitted. “We are, I believe, in the final stage. …We have all the government partners on the…services that are needed for Mariana Resort,” he said.

Villagomez added that there are contract services for managing the front end of the operation. The Mariana Resort & Spa should be in full implementation as a quarantine site starting today, Villagomez said last week at the news briefing last July 17.

The U.S. Department of the Interior recently approved the CNMI to drawdown $2,518,897 in Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act funds. This emergency relief funding was made available under the CARES Act through the Interior’s Office of Insular Affairs to prepare, prevent, and respond to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

Of that amount, $371,800 will be used to prepare the former Mariana Resort property to serve as a quarantine site for inbound passengers. Over 100 rooms in varying sizes will be made available for COVID-19-related activities and for patients should cases reach upsurge limits or if the virus should spread exponentially within the community.

Villagomez stressed that it’s important to know the difference between a quarantine site and the ACS, with the ACS being an actual medical care site that will treat patients, where they can bring in patients to provide care, while a quarantine site is where arriving passengers are quarantined upon arriving on Saipan.