Government should use the two-week Modified Enhanced Community Quarantine (MECQ) period to recalibrate strategies to contain the spread of the coronavirus 2019 (Covid-19), which will help increase confidence in the Philippine economy, according to economists.
On August 2, the President decided to reimpose the MECQ in Mega Manila — Metro Manila, Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, and Rizal — upon the appeal made by the country’s overwhelmed health workers.
Ateneo Center for Economic Research and Development (ACERD) Director Alvin P. Ang told BusinessMirror the two week MECQ should be used to “recalibrate, organize and align policy and practice.”
“What we need is an organized, easy to understand, step by step process on how to implement the test, trace, isolate and treat approach for the ordinary people,” Ang said.
“This remains elusive to the general public and that is why this has to happen. They can actually just continue GCQ (General Community Quarantine) if they had the right and standard information for everyone,” he explained.
Ang said the reimposition of the MECQ will definitely take its toll on the economy in the third quarter. However, its full impact remains to be seen given there’s a month-long GCQ imposed in July.
This allowed firms to partially open and provide employment to some of their workers. The period, he said, also allowed some firms to adjust to the new realities during the pandemic.
Unionbank Chief Economist Ruben Carlo O. Asuncion agreed with Ang and said the projections for the third quarter will still not be as bad as the expectations for the second quarter.
However, Asuncion said the third quarter will still see the economy post a negative year on year growth. This, he said, is not only due to the return to MECQ but the slowdown in manufacturing.
Asuncion said that in July, the country’s manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) hit below 50. This indicates that manufacturing production will continue to be lackluster in the months ahead.
“Definitely, jobs will be affected and the likelihood of certain jobs not coming back will be higher with the now stricter virus containment measure. The loss of jobs does imply the rise of poverty especially for virus-hit areas,” Asuncion told this newspaper.
“However, we don’t think that Q3 (third quarter) GDP’s decline would be worse than Q2 (second quarter) because the MECQ is only in NCR (National Capital Region) and CALABARZON and not the whole of Luzon island back in March and April,” he added.
Foundation of Economic Freedom President Calixto V. Chikiamco told BusinessMirror that the return to MECQ is a “big setback” for the economy, particularly for micro, small, and medium enterprises MSMEs.
He added that along with the MECQ, public transport will again be banned and would have a severe impact on employees dependent on them and retail establishments depended on consumption.
Chikiamco stressed that the return to MECQ is “a bad decision” since will not contain the spread of the virus. He said transmissions will continue to happen, especially in congested communities with crowded dwellings.
“A lockdown will affect a huge swath of economic activity while leaving the virus to multiply in communities. Worse, there’s no plan to gather more reliable and granular data of where the transmissions are really taking place so that the government can resort to localized lockdowns instead of the general lockdowns they are doing,” Chikiamco told BusinessMirror.
Meanwhile, Acting Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Kendrick T. Chua, through the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) Development Information Staff (DIS) Director Nerissa T. Esguerra said the oversight agency is still in the process of completing a technical analysis of the impact of the MECQ.
“In behalf of Secretary Karl, I’d like to inform you that NEDA is still doing the technical analysis. Please bear with us. We will however have a press conference on Thursday and I hope you can join us there,” Esguerra told reporters via the Neda Media Viber Group.
Earlier, Dozens of organizations representing health workers across all fields, led by the Philippine College of Physicians (PCP), said that after five months and with many health workers being infected along with their families, it is impossible to simply expand the Covid-19 care capacities of hospitals because besides the physical requirements, these institutions are hounded by crippling manpower shortages.
The medical community proposed that Mega Manila—NCR, Central Luzon and Calabarzon—be placed under ECQ from August 1 to 15, to provide a “timeout” to refine pandemic control strategies and address urgent problems.
Among the problems they raised are hospital workforce shortages, failure of case finding and isolation, failure of contact tracing and quarantine, transportation safety, workplace safety, public compliance with self-protection and social amelioration.
The medical community made the appeal a day after the government kept the National Capital Region under general community quarantine (GCQ). Along with NCR, 12 other areas in the country are under GCQ.
On Sunday, infections breached the 100,000 mark after the government reported new 5,032 cases—another record-high increase.
Image credits: Nonie Reyes