The chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means on Thursday said 14 million additional workers would be able to work under a new quarantine regime.
In an impact assessment of the changes in quarantine measures from May 16, Albay Rep. Joey Sarte Salceda said the government should also prepare for an additional 2,500 new Covid cases from May 16 to 30.
Under the new regime, he said some 14.6 million workers will be allowed to go to work onsite, on top of the 27.4 million currently allowed to work. This would result in some 34.1 million being allowed to work, with only some 700,000 workers still not allowed to go to work onsite.
In terms of the employment impact of Covid-19, Salceda estimated that some 1.09 million Filipino workers have already lost their jobs, with more job losses to come as the full impact of the pandemic on the financial position of companies are quantified.
“For the second quarter, we expect to have lost as much as 1.09 million jobs, with about 0.96 million seasonal jobs lost, and some 126,000 permanent job losses. For perspective, to create an equivalent number of jobs in the infrastructure sector, one would need a P94 billion investment,” Salceda added.
The recently announced changes in community quarantine regimes “will result in across-the-board increases in mobility,” Salceda added.
He, meanwhile, called the decision to change quarantine regimes “near-optimal” in terms of the tradeoff between allowing workers to resume employment while keeping the volume of infections under control, but warned that without exhaustive tracing, testing, and isolation, outbreaks are still possible.
“From an economic optimization standpoint, this means that for fewer new cases (2,535), the new regime will release more workers (14,605,000 newly allowed to go to work) and more economic activity by as much as 10.7% of quarterly GDP, or about 2.7% of annual GDP, than if, say high-density areas such as NCR or Cebu City were placed under significantly less strict regimes,” he said.
“The 2,500 new cases within 2 weeks once the quarantine is lifted in some areas, that has to decline every week with testing and tracing. My initial recommendation is 40,000 tests a day. I also had discussions with [Presidential Adviser on Flagship Programs and Projects ] Sec. Vince (Dizon) and Finance Sec. Sonny (Dominguez), and they assured me that we will be tracing exhaustively,” Salceda said.
Also the lawmaker said: “While growth rate in cases is likely to be higher in low-risk areas, they are starting from a low base of active cases and possible vectors, have lower population density, and will thus yield fewer number of new individual cases. While with a lower likely growth rate, the high-risk areas will contribute as much as 78.6 percent of new cases within the next 14 days after the new quarantine regimes are implemented.”
The House tax panel chair said that “in terms of letting people go to work without causing too many new cases, the IATF decision gets it roughly right. But that’s under the assumption that we are testing and tracing enough. We need to test and trace without fail.”
From only either general community quarantine (GCQ) and enhanced community quarantine (ECQ), the government, through the Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID) has differentiated classifications into “modified ECQ,” “GCQ,” and “modified GCQ” for high, moderate, and low risk areas respectively.
Image credits: PCOO
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