The country’s socioeconomic chief sees room to ease restrictions in the National Capital Region (NCR) amid a decrease in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases in the region.
Karl Kendrick Chua, National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) secretary, said during the 42nd National Conference of Employers held virtually yesterday growth for the year, which is projected to reach six to seven percent, will be driven by three pillars, one of which is the reopening of the economy.
“The first is we have to open the economy, MGCQ (modified general community quarantine) or better, at the appropriate time. In NCR, we have an opening, given the number of cases that we have been seeing, but we will still have to be very careful because of the new variants,” Chua said.
“This also means that we not only open the supply side, we have to open the demand side, allowing children, families to go out with safeguards,” he added.
The Department of Health yesterday said Metro Manila is now considered a “low-risk” area for COVID-19 as cases exhibit a decline.
Chua, however, said “nothing will move, if there is no confidence,” thus the need to work hard on the vaccination program.
“In the next six weeks, we have 30 million doses coming in. This is our progress so far, 8.4 million vaccines have been delivered to the people. We have started with category A4 or the workers, and notice that we are moving actually quite fast on category A4, and hopefully we can vaccinate as many as we can the workers in the next few months,” Chua said.
“If workers are vaccinated then they bring home much less risk to their family members, and I personally can see school opening, because those that we want to protect, the senior citizens, people with comorbidities and the workers who commute go to the office, are much more protected,” he added.
Apart from the safe reopening of the economy and the timely implementation of the vaccination program, the remaining pillar to support the country’s growth is the recovery package, which consists of a combination of fiscal, monetary, and financial instruments totaling about P2.8 trillion or 15.4 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
“We have a lot of recovery measures already legislated, but not actually fully spent, so we have to accelerate those support that were provided by law since last year. Implementing this (recovery program) will help the economy recover and businesses to get back to their feet,” Chua said.
