Here we go again. The National Capital Region (NCR), the province of Laguna and the cities of Iloilo in Western Visayas and Cagayan de Oro in Northern Mindanao are once more under the rigid Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) on Friday midnight, August 6, until August 20, 2021. This is the latest of hard lockdowns in the country’s leading manufacturing and business areas that are central in the economic life of the nation. The impact of such lockdowns and shutting of the retail, transportation, entertainment, tourism, etc., brought about by the large-scale quarantine cannot be overemphasized.
According to the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA), the two-week lockdown that the government imposed to contain the contagious Delta strain will likely cost the economy P300 billion in output losses. NEDA Secretary Karl Kendrick Chua in press reports said the various community quarantine classifications, which took effect on Friday would affect 68% of the economy and slash P150 billion in production output each week. This amounts to about 600,000 Filipinos employed on a daily wage basis, to temporarily lose their jobs, jacking up poverty incidence by 250,000 people according to NEDA.
Among the hardest hit are our jeepney drivers, the day-to-day carrier of the masses whose precarious livelihood have been on edge throughout the more than fifteen months that the pandemic and its attendant quarantine restrictions on transportation have been with us. Mody Floranda, president of the Manila-based Piston transport group was quoted as saying that, “Mass transport was killed.” Opening malls, factories and offices are useless if people can’t move around.” Cut off from their main source of livelihood, some of the 600,000 or so jeepney drivers nationwide have built small online businesses or pivoted to delivery services such as Lalamove, Piston’s Floranda said. But like many informal workers, most are strapped for cash and ill-suited for high-tech services, leaving some to beg for money, he said.
But the common man’s plight is also the big shipping industry’s bane. Philippine Coastwise Shipping Association Inc. (PCSA) chairman Lucio Lim said the local shipping industry has been losing billions of pesos since the outbreak last year, paralyzing both passenger and cargo volumes. “Our shipping industry especially those that are into the passenger business are really affected. In the case of roll-on roll-off vessels they earn about 40% of their revenues from passengers and now they can’t even have 5% of that,” according to Lim. He said the shipping players have been left to survive on their own amid the onslaught of the pandemic. “There has been practically no support that was given to the shipping sector,” adding that if there was, it was “only little” and not enough to provide relief for the entire industry.
Case in point is under Bayanihan II, some P9.5 billion was set aside for the recovery programs of the Department of Transportation of which P2.6 billion was set aside for assistance to the transportation industry. But only a portion of that was for shipping support through the Philippine Ports Authority (PPA). The shipping industry was allocated about P250 million from DoTr’s budget as financial assistance to be utilized in subsidizing the fees being collected from domestic shipping owners, specifically, dockage (domestic) and lay-up fee (domestic). The Cebu Port Authority which is the country’s busiest being the central nexus for travel in the Visayas and Mindanao was only extended P25 million which is only good for a limited period of time. And that is not only for the hundreds of ships that have to be berthed for lack of passengers but also for the thousands of men and women who manned those vessels. So, what happens then? And how about now that the quarantine lockdowns are up against us all?
A silver lining out of the dark clouds is the announcement from Metro Pacific Hospital Holdings Inc. (MPHHI) president and chief executive officer Augusto Palisoc Jr. that all their hospitals are currently prepared to offer vaccination services to the general population. MPHHI operates the largest private hospital network in the Philippines with 18 hospitals, six provincial cancer radiotherapy centers, two healthcare colleges, and one central laboratory nationwide. It administered a total of 49,313 doses of Covid-19 vaccines to its hospital staff—98% of MPHHI’s health care workers have received their first dose while 90% are already fully vaccinated.
In brief, MPHHI has the wherewithal to conduct vaccination in a massive scale, similar to what US pharma and drug retail chains like CVS Health, Walgreens Boots Alliance and retailer Walmart have been doing in all these months to help make the US a pace-setter in vaccinating its population. Why can’t our health regulators and the Duterte administration allow the private companies to lend a hand in the vaccination drive which they have the means and personnel to do. The only way out of this pandemic is to vaccinate most of our people for the long sought for “herd immunity” and to protect us all from the threat of new virus mutations that may land on our shores. Or maybe they are already here.