Looking forward to reopening the economy

The big breaking news yesterday was that 17 mayors of the National Capital Region (NCR), members of the policy-making Metro Manila Council (MMC), will formally recommend shifting to a General Community Quarantine (GCQ) from June 1. A news report by The Philippine STAR quotes Metro Manila Development Authority General Manager Jojo Garsia as saying that the mayors reached the agreement in their meeting last Tuesday night. Although the MMC can propose the shift to a more relaxed GCQ, this is still subject to approval by the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases and by President Rodrigo Duterte.

I can only second-guess that these 17 NCR mayors made their decision this time to call for the resumption of their stopped economy. In my columns in The Philippine STAR, I warned our local government units that we really need to restart our businesses because in nearly three months of lockdown, it has only resulted in 904 deaths, which is small compared to the number of deaths that both dengue fever and tuberculosis caused among the Filipino people.

At this point, if you looked into social media, a great number of Cebuanos are asking whether or not our ECQ will be extended. At this point, I no longer see any good reason why ECQ should be extended. I already wrote that article as to why a lockdown is a waste of time as proven by well-researched studies that the people who were suspected of being infected by the virus really had nothing to do with the lockdown.

Allow me to repeat what I wrote in The Philippine STAR last Tuesday that I didn’t write in this corner. “The nation’s economy is on track to drop by more than 30% in the second quarter. Unemployment is well into the double digits. Half of small businesses might close in the next six months. All for naught, it would appear, giving the growing pile of evidence that the economic lockdowns didn’t work. The latest evidence comes from a report out of JP Morgan Chase & Co. this week. It finds that there’s been no increase in cases or deaths as other nations and U.S. states start reopening.

“This flies directly in the face of all the public health expert predictions of a major spike once people started moving about. “Virtually everywhere, infection rates have declined after reopening, even after allowing for an appropriate measurement lag,” says the report’s author, Marko Kolanovic, a quantitative strategist at JPMorgan. “This means that the pandemic and COVID-19 likely have (their) own dynamics unrelated to often inconsistent lockdown measures that were being implemented.”

“Another research paper released in early May, this one by Thomas A. J. Meunier of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, found that the lockdowns in western Europe had no evident impact on the epidemic.

“Comparing the trajectory of the epidemic before and after the lockdown, we find no evidence of any discontinuity in the growth rate, doubling time, and reproduction number trends,” Meunier said.”

This only means that whether we have a lockdown or not, the numbers of people infected with COVID-19 will be the same. More so with the number of deaths. Meanwhile under a GCQ, mayors will have the authority to lock down barangays or areas with a concentration of COVID-19 cases. The smaller-scale localized lockdowns are seen as a way to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus disease without overly disrupting the economy.

I understand that this was the scheme adopted by the IATF and Pres. Duterte who said, there was no more need to lock down the entire community when only one or two barangays are infected. So if a particular barangay has a high number of cases then that barangay will go into a lockdown. Here in Cebu City we are lucky that we have three Bayanihan Centers to use; in the North Reclamation Area, the Sacred Heart School for Boys, and the International Eucharistic Convention Center. These are where we should put those who are positive with COVID-19.

At this point, we also need a statement from the Cebu Archdiocese as to when the churches will open. We have gone too long to have our churches shut down while the faithful merely watch Masses over TV. I dare say that it is high time for us to reopen our churches so we can hear Mass and receive the Holy Eucharist.